It's hardly a secret that large segments of the population choose
not to accept scientific data because it conflicts with their
predefined beliefs: economic, political, religious, or otherwise.
But many studies have indicated that these same people aren't happy
with viewing themselves as anti-science, which can create a state of
cognitive dissonance. That has left psychologists pondering the methods
that these people use to rationalize the conflict.

A study published in the Journal
of Applied Social Psychology
takes a look at one of these methods, which the authors term "scientific impotence"—the decision that science can't
actually address the issue at hand properly. It finds evidence
that not only supports the scientific impotence model, but suggests
that it could be contagious. Once a subject has decided that a given
topic is off limits to science, they tend to start applying the same
logic to other issues.

Somehow, that article kind
of fits with something that happened this morning: Someone
pointed out to me an email by Bruce Ivins which seemingly contradicts
something other scientists have been saying since this case began -
that anthrax spores are all roughly the same size.

Open the attached
Power Point attachment.
Although we have known that agar
grown spores (Abshire) are larger than broth grown
spores, it is interesting that the Leighton Doi broth grown spores from
Dugway fermenters are slightly larger than Leighton Doi broth Ivins
spores grown in shake flasks.

Unfortunately, we don't have the images or any actual
numbers. And it does say that the fermenter-created spores
were only "slightly" larger than the flask-created spores. But
some actual data would be nice to have. Are the
larger spores thicker? Longer? Both?

It doesn't make any difference to the investigation, of course.
But, I
already had a comment written for this morning about one of the
supplemental pages I've been thinking about writing and adding to this
web site (and perhaps as a new chapter for a new book). The new
supplemental page would be
tentatively called
"Anthrax By The Numbers." The idea is to put in one file all the
known and confirmed numerical
data about the Ames strain and the attack powders: How big is a
spore? How much does a spore weigh? How much anthrax powder
was in the envelopes? What percentages of the attack powders
contained Silicon? What was the dry weight percentage of the
silicon in the attack powders? What is the "generation time" for
the
Ames strain? Etc.

But now we have a comment from a scientist which suggests that the
approximate size of a "typical" anthrax spore may vary based upon how
it was created. How much does it vary? We don't know.
But it
probably varies enough for those who argue "scientific impotence" to
claim that no number can be relied upon, because Nature is
involved.
They'll argue: Nature is not a machine which always produces absolutely
identical
spores. Nature prefers variation and mutations.

I was having a similar problem when I started looking for a definitive
average
number for the
"generation time" for the Ames strain, i.e., the average time it takes
a living Bacillus anthracis
bacterium to double into two living bacteria. I've seen numbers
ranging from about 10 minutes to about 40 minutes. I used
20 minutes when I created the comic strip "The
Story of Suzy the Spore." But some of the links to the
references I used back then (in 2006) no longer work. Where did
I get that 20 minute figure from?

I started searching for new links to solid data about the
generation time for Bacillus anthracis, and that led me to an article titled "Growth
Characteristics of Virulent Bacillus anthracis and Potential Surrogate
Strains. They report the time is about 10 minutes for the
Vollum and Pasteur strains, and about 30 minutes for the Stern
strain. No mention of Ames, though. So, I refined my search
to look
specifically for Ames strain generation times, and that led me to a
scientific
article which said the time for
Ames was 15 to 20 minutes. But, that article referenced as its
source a
November 12, 2001 article in The New Yorker titled "The Ames
Strain." The New Yorker article says:

Once inside the warm, moist environment of the cow's
digestive system, the spores came back to life, releasing their
bacteria, which grow at phenomenal rates -- each organism replicating itself every
fifteen to twenty minutes.

Hmm. Okay. But, I didn't think I could cite The New Yorker as the definitive resource for how long it
takes a typical Bacillus anthracisAmes
bacterium to replicate or double. Where did the author of
the New Yorker article get that information? The article doesn't
say. But what the article does
say about other matters
illustrates the main problem I have in getting new supplemental pages
finished. I get sidetracked. In this case, I realized this
was the
article
mentioned in the October 29, 2001 email sent to Dr. Bruce Ivins with
the subject "New Yorker urgently asks fact-check on
one question." On Thursday
of last week, I'd found that email on page 11 in Batch
37 of Ivins' emails. But I failed to ask myself the question:
Did I have a copy of the New Yorker article in my archives? I
checked yesterday, and yes,
I did have a link to it in my original web page from that time
period. But the search had led me to the copy
archived by UCLA, and I decided to read the article again.

The New Yorker article seems to be a contender for the highest number of errors in a single
news article. Examples:

Early news reports suggested that the F.B.I. had traced
the anthrax to a laboratory in Ames, from which the bacteria had
perhaps been stolen or otherwise obtained by terrorists.

Wow. It's pure fantasy that terrorists were involved.
And, the FBI did NOT trace the anthrax to any laboratory in
Ames. At that time, the FBI was
trying to trace the source of the Ames strain and their hunt had led them to Iowa, but the Iowa
lead seemed to be a dead end.
No one at any lab in Iowa had ever heard
of "the Ames strain." Nor did they know of any cow in Iowa that
had contracted anthrax in 1980 or 1981, which meant that something had to be incorrect in the lead
that sent them to Iowa. That lead was apparently generated by a 1986
scientific article co-authored by Dr. Gregory B. Knudson, which
contained this tiny tidbit of information about the source for the Ames
strain:

Ames
............................Cow; Iowa, 1980

The New Yorker writer, however, decided that Iowa as indeed the source
for the Ames strain:

It now seemed likely
that there was an Iowa State connection to the Ames strain, and that
the original culture of the Ames isolate was sterilized and incinerated
with the rest of the veterinary school's collection. Jim Roth
had wondered about that possibility, and the school had contacted the
F.B.I. and the Centers for Disease Control before killing the
specimens. Both agencies approved the destruction.

And

What they do know is that it all began with a sick cow, probably somewhere in a
pasture in the western part of Iowa, probably
in 1979.

Probably.
Probably. That was the
reporter's conclusion, probably
because
there were no anthrax cases in Iowa in 1980 or
1981, but someone remembered a case in 1979. And the reporter
jumps to other false conclusions as well:

The National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames
serves as the diagnostic center for the entire nation; it is a
repository for all manner of germs and diseases that afflict American
livestock. That is why the U.S. Army wrote to the N.V.S.L. in late 1980
requesting a sample of an anthrax culture. The Ames lab made a subculture of the
anthrax and sent it to the Army's Medical Research Institute of
Infectious Diseases --USAMRIID -- at Fort Detrick, near Frederick,
Maryland, along with the information that the isolate had come from a
dead cow. The Army named it the Ames strain.

And then the New Yorker article provides wrong and/or misleading
information about "clumping":

In even the purest concentrate, anthrax spores, like most small
particles, will clump together, owing to natural electrostatic force.
"If you just grow up spores in a test tube and then you remove the
liquid, you'll have a kind of a clump," says Philip S. Brachman, a
legendary epidemiologist and an old anthrax hand. "Now, that clump
won't go anywhere -- it'll fall to the ground." The next grand step in
weaponizing anthrax is to cause those purified spores to separate, like
individual sprinkles of a fine powder, so they can linger in the air
and be inhaled.

Spores do NOT - REPEAT NOT -
clump together due to any "natural electrostatic
force." In nature, spores easily fly free and can infect anyone
who breathes in enough of them - as frequently happened in wool sorting
factories during the Industrial Revolution and throughout
history. That's why "wool-sorter's disease" became the focus of
Dr. Robert Koch who, in the 1870's discovered how the disease now known
as "anthrax" was caused by
spores floating in the air.

The act of drying
accumulations of spores in a test tube or on a plate will cause the
spores to clump the same way a clump of tiny wet particles of almost
anything will remain a clump when dried
together. But that
doesn't really happen in nature.
There is no natural process which causes spores to locate each other
and form clumps. Clumps in nature are NOT clumps of spores.
They are generally clumps of dirt
and blood or animal fats, with some spores mixed in the clumps.

Then the author of the article provides some very wrong information:

A single gram of powdered anthrax can
contain as many as a hundred billion anthrax spores.

In reality, a single gram of pure powdered anthrax should always contain roughly a trillion
spores - ten times what the
New Yorker reporter claims. (And that probably still holds true even if
the
spores vary slightly in size based upon how they were made.) The
New Yorker article then provides more
wrong information:

The letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's
office last month contained two
grams of purified, powdery anthrax spores

Two grams is just someone's guess
stated as a fact. The only apparently solid fact we have is
what was
reported in The
New York Times. The spores in the Leahy letter
were weighed, and they weighed .871 grams. That's less than half of what the New
Yorker author claimed.

Here's something that is more interesting than wrong, but still wrong:

The Ames strain's reputation
among laboratory scientists created a demand for it, and the demand was
handily met. Philip Brachman says that if he had wanted to get
hold of
an anthrax strain, he could have simply written to a laboratory that
had it and they would have sent it to him. Germ banks around the world
maintain and sell from collections of bacteria, and hundreds of
university and research laboratories freely exchange strains of various
organisms.

We now know that only 18 labs had the Ames strain, nowhere near the
number people believed in November of 2001. So, there was either
no
great demand or most requests were refused instead of "handily met."

Samples
from the anthrax letters were sent to Keim at his laboratory in
Flagstaff, where he put the bacteria through genetic-sequencing tests
and compared them to known strains. Soon, he had a match: it was the
Ames strain.

In reality, bacteria from Bob Stevens' body was shipped to Paul Keim,
and it was from those samples that it was learned that the Ames strain
was the strain that killed Stevens. That was on October 5, ten
days before the first letter was found. Later, Paul Keim also
tested
samples from the letters and found that the spores in those letters
were all the same strain
that had killed Stevens.

Because of its popularity in
laboratories, Ames had become a
sort of stock strain, untraceable
through its genetics alone to any particular source.

Another belief stated as fact. We now know that it was not any
"sort of stock strain" and genetics alone could and did trace it to a
particular source - directly to flask RMR-1029, which was controlled by
Bruce Ivins.

The
anthrax sent to Senator
Daschle's office was weaponized -- that is, it had been pulverized by
the method that Bill Patrick pioneered almost forty years ago.

Total baloney. Made up nonsense. False conclusions
resulting from beliefs
instead of from research. The anthrax sent to Senator Daschle's
office was NOT weaponized.

The fact that it was
weaponized means that the powder contained not only anthrax spores but
the anti-caking material that allows the spores to float free.
Identifying that material --which has been described as a fine,
brownish particulate -- could help to pinpoint the source.

More
total baloney. More
made up nonsense. More
false conclusions resulting from beliefs
instead of from research.

In announcing the
discovery
that an anti-cling agent had been added to the anthrax sent
through the
mail, intelligence officials declared that only three nations in the
world had the capacity to weaponize anthrax in that manner: the
United
States, the former Soviet Union, and Iraq. According to the Washington
Post, an unnamed government
official also said that "the totality of the evidence in hand suggests
that it is unlikely that the spores were originally produced in the
former Soviet Union or Iraq."

The "intelligence officials" who were making those claims - if they
really existed - were people who had never seen the attack anthrax and
who were making assumptions based upon incorrect information printed in
the media. This New Yorker article is a prime example of just how
much nonsense was being printed in the early days of the case.

And, of course, there was never a retraction article from The New
Yorker. They never published a list of all the errors in the
article.
And, as a result, people today are probably still using it as a source
for scientific papers. The statement that it takes "fifteen
to twenty
minutes" for an anthrax bacterium to replicate itself may be totally
true, but how can I cite that data when it's from an article so filled
with errors?

And there apparently will never be any retractions to the claims made
by Dr. Henry Heine about how long it would take Dr. Ivins to create the
spores in the attack letters. Millions of people read what
was in The
New York Times and all the other newspapers and magazines, and tens
thousands probably listened to the same nonsense on radio
programs. I
only get about 600 visitors a day to this site. The emails from
Dr.
Ivins prove
that Dr. Heine was wrong. But how many people are going to
believe the
facts when false information
is so widely distributed and redistributed, and when there are so many
ways to rationalize ignoring the facts?
Similar thoughts have been keeping me from working
on another new supplemental page, the one I've tentatively titled "Dr.
Bruce Ivins and the Murder of Bob Stevens." When I start trying
to figure out what was in Dr. Ivins' mind by looking at his actions,
things seem fairly clear. But will my interpretations be
convincing? I don't believe anything I write will ever change the
mind of any True Believer or conspiracy theorist, but how convincing
would my interpretations be to a person with an open mind? Here
are three examples uncovered last week:

1.
When the source of the Ames stain suddenly became uncertain,
Dr. Ivins was inordinately upset about being questioned regarding its
source. He wrote:

"the
individuals primarily
responsible for determining the location of the strain are located in
Ames, Iowa, not in Frederick, Maryland"

2. When people started claiming that the Ames strain may have come from USAMRIID, Ivins
claimed it was an attack upon
scientists working for the Department of Defense. In an apparent
attempt
to get support from other scientists at USAMRIID, he wrote:

"it is transparently
evident that we are being harassed by our regular
detractors simply because we are DOD researchers."

3. When it became totally clear
that the
Ames strain came from Texas and not
from Iowa, Ivins argued that it must have also gone to Iowa - perhaps
to Iowa and then to
USAMRIID. He wrote:

"He also said
that it is possible that the actual case (dead cow) may have been in
Texas, and that the strain may have
then gone from Texas to Ames, Iowa, and then to XXXXX. If that
is the case, then USAMRIID is third in
line as far the origin of the "Ames strain," and we have no idea as to
where the Texas
lab or the NVSL in Ames sent the strain."

In his actions, Dr. Ivins' expressed an intense need to have the Ames
strain be a widely distributed, totally
untraceable strain. When
that fact became doubtful, he then tried to convince people that
someone at some other lab - in Texas or in Iowa - could have made the
powders. He was trying again and again to point people away from
USAMRIID. That only makes sense if he used
the Ames strain because he believed it was untraceable.
When it became clear that USAMRIID was indeed the source, he then
started pointing to others at USAMRIID as possible suspects.

It seems very clear what Dr. Ivins' thoughts were at that time the
source of the Ames strain was being investigated. If he'd been
innocent, it shouldn't have made any difference to him where the
anthrax came from. But it clearly did make a difference to him.

Dr. Ivins went through a similar thought process when he learned of Bob
Stevens' death. Dr. Ivins sent out email after email trying to
find some way that Bob Stevens could have died from anthrax contracted
from some natural source
instead of the anthrax-filled letter that Dr. Ivins had sent to the
National Enquirer - even though a natural source was extremely unlikely. Why else
would it be so important to Dr. Ivins that the death of Bob Stevens be
from some natural source and not from some "terrorist" action?

In a taped discussion with "a witness" not long before his suicide (as
reported on pages 70 & 71 of the
FBI summary), Dr.
Ivins said:

"I
don’t have it in
my heart to kill anybody""I am
not a
killer at heart.""I
don’t think of myself
as a vicious, a, a nasty evil person."

So, we know some of what was going through Dr. Ivins' mind before his
suicide. He hadn't intended to kill anyone. It should be
clear that variations on those same
thoughts were in his mind when he prepared the deadly letters and
mailed them. I just need to sit down and focus on writing a
convincing narrative of what happened.

Okay, I've updated the References section, adding those three
references. So, now I
need to get back to whatever it was I was working on before I got
sidetracked. What was I working on? Focus.
Focus. Focus.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, May 23,
2010, thru Saturday, May 29, 2010
May 27, 2010 - Ah!
Finally! I'd been looking for the link to the USAMRIID web site
where Dr. Ivins' actual emails are posted. I'd misplaced
it.
Someone finally supplied the link for me. It's HERE.
So, now no one has to rely upon someone else's copies. We
can all go directly to the source.

Batch
55 of Dr. Ivins emails contains the email I discussed on May 25 where Dr. Ivins
calculated the costs and manhours for producing 500 billion
spores. It's on page 8 of the 208 page .pdf
file.

On page 6 of that same batch is the October 12, 2001 email where Dr.
Ivins complains that people should be asking the USDA where the Ames
strain came from, not Ft. Detrick.

Looking through batch
57 of the emails, I see that page 14 of the 310 page .pdf file
contains Bruce Ivins' calculations for making one trillion spores ("a 12-flask run of anthrax (1X 10^12
spores"). It's a repeat of the calculations for making 500
billion spores, except that all the man-hours are doubled:

I suppose it could still be argued that it routinely took Ivins almost a month to create the
amount of spores that were in the anthrax letters, yet others have said
that it could have been done in a matter of days. The difference
appears to be that creating spores at night and on weekends is NOT a
routine procedure, and therefore it is not necessary to follow all the
steps that are followed when creating spores to be used for
official aerosol
testing.

The cost calculations are repeated on page 57, 58, 109-110, 115, 120,
124, 127and 136. It appears that Dr. Ivins merely copied and
pasted the same numbers over and over whenever he was asked for such
calculations.

I've downloaded copies of the .pdfs to my own files for my own
use. They are searchable files -
unlike a lot of .pdf files which are pictures of documents which cannot
be searched. For example, if you want to look for the term
"USDA," it's a simple
search to look for it. I did a search through Batches 50 -
54 looking for "USDA" and found no mention of the term. Then, I
looked at Batch
37 and found a very interesting email on page 11. It contains
questions from the New Yorker magazine intermingled with answers that
may or may not be from Dr. Bruce Ivins (and there may be other people
asking questions, too, as the email from the New Yorker gets forwarded
from person to person at USAMRIID):

-----Original
Message-----From:Sent: Monday, October 29, 2001 7:08 PMTo:Cc: bruce.ivins@amedd.army.mil;Subject: New Yorker urgently asks fact-check on
one question. PleaseDear XXXXXX Dr. Ivins),Okay, I give. But I have to turn this
story in tomorrow night, forpublication next week. In the interest of
factual accuracy, would one of you be kind enough to answer this question?The field tests of the human anthrax
vaccine conducted by XXXXXX and his colleagues in the 1950s (testing
those workers up in New England who handled goat hair) demonstrated the
efficacy of the human anthrax vaccine against inhalation anthrax. Why were
y'all still testing it on rhesus monkeysa few years ago?*****************************************************************We were testing a vaccine that was
somewhat different than the 1950s vaccine, with respect to fermentation conditions and absorption
onto different aluminum adjuvants.

That IS why you all requested what you called the "Ames strain" in 1980, isn't it? Or, were those
for different tests?***************************************************************In late 1980 and early 1981, when anthrax
research had dramatically picked up as a result of learning ofthe Sverdlovsk incident, we began writing
to scientists, laborataories and culture collections to gathersample strains for the impending vaccine
research. The strain sent to us
by the NVSL at the USDA inAmes,
Iowa, was one of them. [NVSL = National Veterinary
Services Laboratories, Ames, Iowa]
More than anything, I really need
to know, even if it's only in the mostgeneral terms, why y'all needed that
strain from the NVSL in 1980.**************************************************************We were not seeking that specific strain,
(which did not come with a specific designation) nor at the time did we know anything about its
virulence. We asked for strains from other laboratories as well. That strain was not singled out for us to
obtain by anyone. It just so happened that it was one strain that we obtained through our many
requests.
It reallydoes help to be as
factually accurate as possible in moments such as this,especially given the fact that, for
example, the New Scientist now
reports that USAMRIID had weaponized the "Ames"
strain.**********************************************************************************You have GOT to be kidding me!!!!!! This
is scurrilous, egregious, outrageous, as well as completelywrong.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
It's my understanding that the "Ames" strain was not weaponized by
the U.S.**********************************************************That is correct.

But I'd really, really loveto know if I'm going
to be correct in explaining that USAMRIID asked for thisbloody
isolate from that unfortunate bovine in 1980 because it waschallenging the
human anthrax vaccine.***********************************************************************************In late 1980 and early 1981, when anthrax
research started up again here at USAMRIID, we had novirulent strains in the institute to use
for challenge in vaccine studies. We eventually were sent theVollum 1B strain from Dugway Proving
Ground. We also obtained strains, including the Ames strain,from other laboratories. We intended to
test the human vaccine against various virulent strains tohopefully demonstrate in the guinea pig
model that AVA was protective against all strains. The "Ames"strain was one of those tested, and it
was found to be highly refractory to AVA in the guinea pig model.
Thank you very much,

On page 19 of that Ivins
email batch #38 there's an email which indicates that as of
November 28, 2001 they still
hadn't figured out where the Ames strain came from. They still believed that it came from
the USDA in Ames, Iowa. Dr. Ivins wrote at that time:

In view of recent
comments by XXXXX and
XXXXX to the press about the supposed ease of getting anthrax strains (especially
the Ames strain) from XXXXX and USAMRIID, perhaps it should be pointed out to people that
neither of the above individuals got the strain from us. The Ames strain was sent to Porton Down in the mid
1980s. From there, the Brits sent the strain to XXXXX who, in turn sent it to XXXXX.
Also, it should be pointed out that this is not a "Fort Detrick strain." It was a
strain from the USDA National Veterinary Service Laboratory in Ames,
Iowa. Neither they,
nor Iowa State University (which conveniently autoclaved all of its B.
anthracis strains in October) are able (or
willing) to provide a record of all the individuals and institutions
that received the Ames strain from them. We know
EXACTLY who received the Ames strain (and other B. anthracis strains)
from us:

There is no mention of the USDA in batch #39 (nor is there any mention
of
Texas). Batch
#40, however, contains this email on page 37:

From: Ivins, Bruce
E Dr USAMRIIDTo: XXXXXCc: XXXXXSubject: Proprietary - not for Public
DistributionDate: Tuesday, January 22, 2002 8:06:27 AM
Proprietary - Not for Public Distribution
This morning's Washington Post described the genomic sequencing of Ames
strains. They mentioned the"USAMRIID" strain, but which USAMRIID
Ames strain are they talking about? XXXXX and I have theoriginal seed stock Ames strain from
the agar slant received from Ames, Iowa USDA. We also have Ames spores that Dugway made for us.
XXXXX and DSD (and possibly
others) have XXXXX version
of the Ames strain (BA 1004). This version was apparently passaged an
unknown number of times
while XXXXX was here.
The point is...when someone talks about the "USAMRIID" Ames strain, there are actually three versions
of this "USAMRIID" Ames strain, with only one of them being the
original slant seed stock.
- Bruce

So, on January 22, 2002, Dr. Ivins still
believes (or claims to believe) that the Ames strain came from the USDA
in Iowa, and he's trying to convince people that a lot of others besides USAMRIID also have the Ames
strain. It's another example of how important it was to Dr.
Ivins that his belief be correct that the Ames strain was a very
widely-used, very common strain that would be impossible to trace to a specific
source.

I just spoke on the
phone with XXXXX at
AFRRI [Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute]. He is going
to FAX me whatever information he has on the Ames strain. He told me that the strain was
definitely sent to him from the NVSL in Ames, Iowa. He also said
that it is possible that the actual case (dead cow) may have been in
Texas, and that the strain may have
then gone from Texas to Ames, Iowa, and then to XXXXX. If that
is the case, then USAMRIID is third in
line as far the origin of the "Ames strain," and we have no idea as to
where the Texas
lab or the NVSL in Ames sent the strain. I will keep everyone
informed on this as soon as I get more information from XXXXX.
- Bruce

Ah! Texas is now in the picture as of January 29, 2002. And
Dr. Ivins (and probably everyone else) now believes it went from Texas
to the USDA in Ames and from the USDA to USAMRIID.

An attachment to that same email on that same page and with the same
date contains this:

We most certainly
DID get the "Ames strain" from the USDA, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services,
National Veterinary Services Laboratories, P.O. Box 844, Ames, Iowa
50010. We have
a Xerox copy of the original mailing label from them.

Ah. I have the mailing label,
too. They still needed to figure out that the Texas
Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Laboratory at Texas A&M used a prepaid USDA mailing label in order to save on shipping costs
as they sent the Ames sample from Texas directly to USAMRIID.

Oops. On the next page, page 65, there's this from January 29:

XXXXX Bruce: Please
see message below,
which was forwarded to me XXXXX who works in Homeland Security in the White
House. Can you clarify at all for me as to assertion that Ames
never came from Iowa and that we got Ames from a lab in Texas?
Have any of you been contacted by the
press on this? Obviously, would like to get ahead of the curve on this
if press is going to make these
assertions. Immediate feedback, please.

The message that is apparently from the headquarters of the USDA has
the subject
"Heads Up" and says:

We have been
working with XXXXX at the
Wash Post on an Anthrax story for several months.
He initially submitted a FOIA on information. We hooked him up with
folks atour lab in
Ames. XXXXX think I emailed earlier on this). Friday, the NYT called for the same information.
Essentially both reporters are doing stories on the history of the Ames strain. Evidence is becoming more clear that
show the so called Ames strain never even
came from Iowa...the NYT
reporter somehow had the info that showed this. We
can
expect possible stories on this within the next few days..They have both
contacted the Army. The investigation is turning up info
that shows that the Army may have gotten it from a lab in Texas.Our key points are: Anthrax strains are similiar
and it is difficult to distinguish, but USDAhas no evidence to
indicate that the 'ames' strain was ever in our lab in Iowa.I'd like to give the Army folks a heads
up...do you have a contact?

Also on page 65 is this from Dr. Ivins:

I remember it
coming from Iowa,
however. About the same
time that we received the Ames strain, we received the "Texas" strain
from XXXXX at Texas A&M. Let me know if there's more info that we
can provide.- Bruce

Yup. Now they know that the Ames strain came from Texas A&M,
but Dr. Ivins still thinks (or hopes) there may have been some other
samples of Ames that went to the USDA in Ames and got widely
distributed
from there.

Ending my search for "USDA" and looking for "Texas," instead, I found
that page 28 of that same .pdf file (#40) contains the January 30, 2002
New York Times article by William Broad which says:

Federal
investigators have found in
recent weeks that the so-called Ames
strain was first identified not in Ames,Iowa,
its reputed home, but a thousand miles south, in Texas.
The strain of the bacteria was found on a dead cownear the Mexican border in 1981, and the
geographic gaffe was the result of a
clerical error by a scientificresearcher.

The article still contains some incorrect information. They still
think the Ames strain is a common strain in Texas. It
wasn't. The article suggests the culprit could have simply
dug the Ames strain out of the soil in Texas. Because it is such
a rare strain, that is virtually (but not completely) impossible (and
it wouldn't contain the 4 mutations).

On page 30, there's a related article from The Associated Press which
names names:

WASHINGTON (AP) --
To Dr. Michael L.
Vickers, a dead cow lying in a remote
pasture of a South Texas ranch in 1981 was no different from the hundreds of
other felled cattle he had seen.
Vickers, who has a private veterinary practice in nearbyFalfurrias, sliced out tissue from the
animal -- the liver,the spleen and other organs -- put them
into a plastic ice chest and sent them
by bus to a laboratory in CollegeStation, home of Texas A&M.
He was sure the animal had died of anthrax -- theblackberry color of the spleen was the
main clue -- but hesought confirmation from the Texas
Veterinary Medical Diagnostic
Laboratory.
``It was just another anthrax,'' recalls Vickers. ``In thefield, anthrax is just anthrax. We see it
just about everyyear.''
Vickers had no idea that 21 years later bacteria perhapsdescended from those specimens he
collected would be at the center of a bioterrorism attack that
would kill fivepeople, infect a
dozen more and force the evacuation andsterilization of buildings in Florida,
New York and Washington.
Back in 1981, workers at the College Station lab receivedVickers' package and cultured specimens
from the organs of the dead cow. They
quickly confirmed that the specimenswere loaded with bacteria with the
characteristic bamboo-jointed rods
of anthrax.Dr. Konrad Eugster,
chief of the diagnostic lab in 1981,remembered that the
Army had earlier requested a freshfield
isolate of anthrax. He said two vials filled with the anthrax cultures
were packaged in ice and shipped to FortDetrick,
Md., headquarters of the Army's biological warfare research
center.Eugster said the box
bore a prepaid label with the returnaddress of the
National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, an
Agriculture Department facility.

The local reporter who interviewed me last Friday seemed totally
puzzled about why I was still fascinated by the Amerithrax
investigation after all these years. What I found and learned
today is a very good example of what keeps me fascinated with this
case. I'm always fascinated with seeing how mistaken beliefs are
found to be incorrect and how long it takes - and all the steps
required
- to make everything clear to everyone.

May 25, 2010 (B) - I just noticed
something else in the Bruce Ivins emails recently posted to Lew
Weinstein's web site. In an email sent by Bruce Ivins on
Sunday, March 21, 2004, Dr. Ivins states:

I get (in open
flask production) 3 X
10^11 purified spores per liter of original culture.

3 X 10^11 in layman's
language is 300 billion.
It's also 300 billion spores per
liter. And Dr. Ivins could do 4 or 5 liters at a time.
So, we have a totally unimpeachable
source debunking Dr. Henry Heine's claim that Dr. Ivins could only
create 10 billion spores
per run. Dr. Ivins himself
debunked what Dr. Heine claimed. (See my comment for May 23.)

Ah! It gets better and better. Also on Lew Weinstein's web
site is an email written by Bruce Ivins which explains how many man hours it takes to
create 500 billion
spores. The email is dated Friday, April 23,
2004 and says:

Following our
meeting yesterday, the
following is what I calculate our direct costs to be from producing,
harvesting and purifying a single
run of Ames spores, total of 5 X 10^11 [500 billion] spores:Preparation for run (ordering and
preparing all media, glassware, centrifuge rotor and bottles,
laboratory
area, etc.) - 16 hours.Spore production (inoculation, harvest,
wash, storage, counts) - 8 hours.Cleanup and decontamination of materials
and area - 8 hours [for each of two people].Purification of spores in Hypaque - 2
hours [for each of two people].Characterization of spores (% refractile,
non-refractile, vegetatives cells, debris, clumping, encapsulation,
viability, heat resistance) - 4 hours (for each of two people).

That last step probably wouldn't be needed when creating spores in
secret for sending through the mails. But, no matter how you look
at those numbers, it would NOT take Dr. Ivins a
year to create 2.5 million spores as Dr. Henry Heine claimed,
particularly if one batch is very crude and doesn't need most of the
steps listed above.

May 25, 2010 (A) -
Someone on
another
web site is hunting for proof of Dr. Ivins' innocence, but, as one
would expect, he's finding only further evidence of Dr. Ivins'
guilt. Using FOIA requests, he has obtained emails sent by Dr.
Ivins in 2003 and 2004. An email Dr. Ivins sent out in 2004
contains as subset an
email Ivins sent out on October 12, 2001. People at that time
were still trying to track down the true source of the Ames
strain. In his 2001 email Dr. Ivins appears very angry or testy
as he writes:

I can tell you to
whom I have sent this
so-called "Ames" strain. Please keep in mind that a) it is
apparently 50 years old; b) that USAMRIID received this strain 20 years
ago; c) that it is a USDA strain,
not a USAMRIID strain, U.S. Army strain, or Department of Defense strain;
d) the individuals primarily
responsible for determining the location of the strain are located in
Ames, Iowa, not in Frederick, Maryland; e) that of any U.S. labs
having human pathogenic strains (including B. anthracis), none have
higher security than USAMRIID, f) that if we are the only recipients of
this "tasker," it is transparently evident that we are being harassed by our regular
detractors simply because we are DOD researchers. It is not within the purview of
USAMRIID researchers to ascertain where the USDA has sent its strains
such as Delta-Ames and ANR, which can be converted to full virulence
using existing molecular biology models, and which would be identified
as the "Ames" strain.)

So, we have another confirmation
that at the time of the mailings Dr. Ivins (like everyone else) falsely
believed the Ames strain came from the USDA in Ames, Iowa.
However, no one at the USDA nor anywhere else in Iowa knew anything
about any "Ames" strain. And because the facts were
pointing back at USAMRIID, Ivins argued that they are being "harassed"
just because they are part of the Department of Defense.

It's clear from his tone that Dr. Ivins was very heavily invested in his belief that the Ames strain
had been distributed by the USDA to countless labs all over the
world. He interpreted the effort to determine the true source of the Ames strain to
be an attack upon the DOD and a danger
to his beliefs. A scientist not so heavily invested would
probably have found it amusing
that people were having such a hard time tracking down the true source
of the Ames strain.

May 24, 2010 - For what it's worth,
this morning someone pointed out an error in the comment I wrote
yesterday. The error is in this quote from the WFMD interviewer:

Interviewer:
I just got an IM [Instant Message] from somebody who said "When Ivins
admitted he took the Tylenol-3
overdose, were there only government
doctors and witnesses involved there?" Do you know that?

Dr. Ivins didn't take "Tylenol 3" which
contains codeine, he took Tylenol-PM which does NOT contain
codeine. Wikipedia
says,

A summary of the police
report of his death, released in 2009, lists the cause of death as liver
and kidney failure, citing his purchase
of 2 bottles of Tylenol PM (containing diphenhydramine), contradicting earlier
reports of Tylenol with codeine.[24]

I didn't notice the error, even though it was a subject of several
discussions in the past. Evidently, Tylenol overdosing is a
"hot
button issue" with some people - particularly some paramedics.
They feel that the FDA should require that all types of Tylenol be sold with
an
antidote in the capsule, as is done in England. The
antidote (a small amount of an amino acid) would prevent the kind of
"ugly deaths" that are associated with overdoses of acetaminophen.

May 23, 2010 - Last week was another
slow week for Internet discussion about the anthrax case, but it was a
very active week for me. Late in
the prior week, a local newspaper reporter called me to arrange an
interview for Friday the
21st, which meant I spent much of last week thinking about what the
reporter might ask and what important subjects I should probably try to
address. (I also had to spend a lot of
time cleaning up my apartment in preparation for the interview.)

And, of course, as with all interviews I've done, as soon as the
interview was over, I began thinking about all the things I should have mentioned but didn't.
The interview was evidently partially or wholly prompted by the Dr.
Henry Heine interviews in the media, and the fact that on this web site
I had dismissed Dr. Heine's opinions as uninformed and self-serving.

During my interview with the local reporter, I talked a great deal
about the evidence against Dr. Bruce Ivins, and I stepped through all
the evidence which makes it abundantly
clear that Dr. Ivins was the
culprit responsible for the anthrax attacks. The reporter must
have asked at least three times if I had any doubts at all about Dr.
Ivins' guilt. Each time I told her, I have no doubts about Ivins' guilt.

What she didn't ask, and what I failed to mention, are the reasons I can dismiss the opinions
of Dr. Heine. I'm just a guy on the Internet, and I'm saying that
a respected scientist who personally
knew Dr.
Ivins is wrong.
Is it simply because I have different opinions? No. It is
because I have facts which show that Dr. Heine's opinions are
incorrect.

First and foremost, Dr. Heine still believes the attack anthrax was
"weapons grade" and weaponized with silicon. That is the reason
why he doesn't believe Ivins
could have made it. How do I know
that is what Dr. Heine believes? I know it because I listened to the
April 21, 2010 WFMD radio interview where the interviewer
(apparently Bob Miller) discussed the case with Dr. Heine.
Beginning at the 13:45 minute mark in the 26:06 minute interview, this
exchange takes place:

Interviewer:
You said that
there seems to be - in the department of Justice web site that you saw
- there's some missing interviews.Dr.
Heine: Yes.Interviewer:
The interviews you gave when they were focused on Dr. Steven
Hatfill. Maybe. Or am I ...?Dr.
Heine: Well, I mean, among other things, the early interviews
from about late October of 2001 to 2003 ... that's when the interviews
pick up in 2003. So, there is a little over a year - maybe
a year and a couple months' worth of interviews that are completely
omitted from what they've released.

Interviewer:
In
those interviews, you said there is something that is glaring and
something that you look at and that other people are looking at as well
- and that is the whole silicone
issue and how silicone is linked in this.

Dr. Heine:
And it may be coincidence, but that's when there was some keen interest in - early
on - the silicone content of the spores. And they were
asking us questions regarding some of the work we had done - and there
was a key interest then - Did you introduce silicone? Why did you
do that? And what happened to those samples?

Interviewer:
And why is silicone germane to
this whole thing?

Dr. Heine:
Well, it gets back to the guest you had on a couple weeks before my
first visit, and there's been a
big question about the silicone of the spore preps. It's
very high. This suggests ... it
gets back to the very early reports about this being weapons grade
as it were. And, the point that these spores were manipulated and
processed in some way.

Interviewer:
When we talk about silicone about the anthrax, what does the silicone
do to with the makeup of the anthrax to make it important in this whole
investigation?

Dr. Heine:
Well,
this is where you need another expert, and I would have to go based upon what I've read and so
forth, but what has been suggested
is that higher silicone content is what made this particular material
so powdery and so readily able to form a cloud - you know, just
on a puff. The material was very much like talcum powder.
And anybody who has ever opened a bottle of talcum powder knows -
you haven't even put pressure on it and it sort of puffs. That's
what this material was doing. So, what some of these experts in silicone
science are saying it that the silicone science was done to do just
that to the spores and make them more readily dispersable.

Interviewer:And that, as I
remember from out last
conversation, cannot be done and produced at Ft. Detrick.

Dr. Heine:No.
Ft.
Detrick doesn't have that ability. And particularly Bruce
didn't have that ability or knowledge.

Interviewer:And therefore, if Ft.
Detrick didn't have the ability, Bruce Ivins didn't have the ability,
who did have the ability?

Dr. Heine:
Well,
this gets back to possible state
sponsored terrorism. Perhaps
there are some other labs in this country that might have that
ability. That I don't know.

Dr. Heine believes the silicon in the
attack anthrax indicates it was "weapons grade" and, therefore, the
powders could not
have been made at Ft. Detrick and particularly not by Dr. Bruce
Ivins. That is what Dr. Heine said.

But, the attack spores were NOT "weapons grade," the silicon in the
spores had NOTHING to do with making the spores more "dispersable," and
the silicon was NOT added as part of some "silicone science." The
entire silicon issue was a false lead
that went nowhere. That's probably why it's not included in the
Dr. Ivins case files.

How do I know this? Is it just the belief of some guy on the
Internet versus the beliefs of an experienced microbiologist who
actually worked at Ft. Detrick? No. It's what the facts say. It was real experts say. People who have actually examined the
attack anthrax say the silicon was NOT added deliberately in some
weaponization procedure. And they've been saying it for over eight years.
Among the vast amount of material
publicly available on this subject, I have the slide presentation by
Dr. Joseph Michael at the NAS meeting on September 25, 2009.
Images in that slide presentation show the location of the
silicon. They even show that there was silicon inside the spore
coats of spores that were still
inside the mother germ, proving beyond any reasonable doubt that
it was NOT silicon added after
the spores were fully formed.

Dr. Heine is
relying
upon suggestions by people who have NOT examined the
attack anthrax, but who have stated or published their opinions about
it anyway.

Because this subject was brought up again, I noticed this statement
once again:

Dr.
Heine: Well, it
gets back to the guest you had on
a couple weeks before my first visit

What guest from a couple weeks before? And what did Dr. Heine say
during his first visit? The first time I listened to Dr. Heine's
April 21 interview, I believe I accessed it from the web site belonging
to the Frederick News-Post. They didn't provide any way to get to
the earlier interviews.

Yesterday morning, I did a Google search for the web site for WFMD and "Morning News Express,"
and I found that Dr. Heine's "first interview" is also on-line, and
that
interview actually consists of 3 parts totalling around an hour and a half. The
first part is 28:41 minutes long. The
second part is 27:36 minutes long. And the
third part is 35:12 minutes long. All three parts are from
February 25, 2010. I also learned that the interview with the
other guest, Edward
Jay Epstein, is 10:52 minutes long and occurred via telephone on
January 27, 2010. (On my computer, the time information for
the interviews are only displayed when you download and save them and
then
access the saved versions.)

The Edward Jay Epstein interview is basically just a early version of
his opinion piece from the
February 24, 2010 issue of The Wall Street Journal.
I discussed that opinion piece in my (A) comment on February 24.
Mr.
Epstein is another person who still somehow believes the attack anthrax
was
weaponized with silicon.

The lengthy, 3-part
February 25
interview with Dr. Heine contains a lot of fascinating details about
Ft. Detrick. And it contains a lot of details about his reasoning
and
his beliefs.
In part one of the
February 25 interview, Dr. Heine stated that his work at USAMRIID
involved testing antibiotics.
He wasn't involved with vaccines. When the anthrax attacks
occurred, he was only involved in checking to see if the attack anthrax
was
resistant to antibiotics. It wasn't. (It appears he had no
need to work with spores. He grew bacteria and tested antibiotics
on the living bacteria.) Dr. Heine put it this way: "My
responsibility was to identify a set of antibiotics that would work in
treatment for those people who had been exposed.
Secondarily, my responsibility was to identify if there were any
unusual antibiotic resistances, because that would suggest that
somebody had manipulated it."

Dr. Heine demonstrates how misinformed he is about how the
Ames strain got to Ft. Detrick
with this comment at around the 25:10 minute point:

"The Ames strain,
which is now the infamous Ames strain, was isolated from a cow that was
found dead in Texas back in the 80's at some point. The
U.S. Department of Agriculture is, of course, responsible for
that. They collected that sample. They had that in
their center in Ames, Iowa. That particular strain was shipped to
USAMRIID, and because it had 'Ames, Iowa' on the box, the technician
that processed that gave it the name 'Ames'."

In reality, of course, the Ames strain was never anywhere near Ames,
Iowa or the USDA. It was shipped directly from a lab at Texas
A&M to USAMRIID. There is testimony from the sender at
Texas A&M, the recipient at USAMRIID, and we have the mailing label and the hand-written letter
from the Texas Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Laboratories (TVMDL) that
was in the package with the biological samples.

In part two
of the
February 25 interview, Dr. Heine states that one of the reasons he left
USAMRIID was because of all the security measures that are now in
effect and how they almost prevent people from getting any work
done. Dr. Heine claims that Dr. Ivins didn't have the ability to
dry the spores, but he's assuming it was done with a
lyophilzer. Dr. Heine worked in Building
1412, while Dr. Ivins worked in Building 1425. (Dr. Steven
Hatfill
also worked in Building 1412, but he left about the same time Dr. Heine
started working there. They never met.) Dr. Heine claims
that samples from RMR-1029
were stored in Building 1412. I suspect, however, that those were
re-growths using the single colony pick technique, which would mean
they were genetically different from the contents of flask RMR-1029.

Dr. Heine claims that Dr. Ivins didn't have the ability to make dried
powered anthrax, but Dr. Heine did.
However, Dr. Heine had a
perfect alibi. When the letters were mailed, Dr. Heine was in
England and unable to get a flight because of the chaos and all the new
precautions
put into effect after 9/11.

At the 18:55 minute point, Dr. Heine makes this statement:

"When I got my PhD,
as part of my PhD project was growing up large quantities of bacteria
and, unfortunately, reducing them down to dry powder. This was
salmonella, and it was to extract certain things from the
bacteria. But, yes, I do know how to do that.
And I told the FBI that."

I find it interesting that Dr. Heine believes that
because he made dried salmonella bacteria, that gave him the necessary
expertise to make dried anthrax, but nothing
Ivins ever did in working
directly with anthrax for decades provided anything like the same
expertise.

Dr. Heine claims over and over that it would have taken Dr. Ivins 50
weeks of
non-stop culturing to create the amount of spores in the letters.

In part three of the
February 25 interview, Dr. Heine makes statements about the silicon in
the attack anthrax that are similar to the comments he made on April
21. He repeats his mistaken beliefs about the quantities of
spores in the envelopes.

He believes there wereat least
EIGHT anthrax letters. He believes that one letter got
chewed up
in the machinery at the Brentwood mail processing center in Washington,
DC, and, for him, that explains why the Brentwood mail center was so
contaminated. That's a theory
I never heard before, and it's certainly NOT verified or even supported
by any facts.

He believes that each one of the "eight" letters contained "one to two
grams" of spores, even though it's been known for almost nine years that the media
letters contained a very crude anthrax powder that was very different
from the senate letters. According to Dr. Heine, there were
8 to 16 grams of
spores in
the letters. In reality, the contents of the Leahy letter
were actually weighed and that letter contained .871 grams of
spores. And the media letters were roughly 90 percent debris and
only 10 percent spores, so there were probably no more than 2.5 grams
of
spores in all the letters combined.

He says that the only large-scale culturing method Ivins had available
to him was
shaking flasks, with a maximum of four or five flasks being shaken at
one time. And, according to Dr. Heine, the largest number of
spores Ivins could create in one run of four or five flasks was 10
billion
spores. "10 followed by nine zeroes." But, as I reported in
my May
2-3 and May 4 comments, Dr. Ivins repeatedly calculated that he and his
staff were routinely making 433
billion
spores per run. And,
according to others who routinely work with anthrax and other
spore-forming bacteria, they can routinely get 500 billion spores or
more from
a
single 1-liter flask. Since Dr. Heine seems to have no experience with making
anthrax spores, he doesn't seem to be a better authority than Bruce
Ivins and the others who actually made anthrax spores. (The question of how many spores can be
produced in a given period of time is certainly
a question that the
National Academies of Science can firmly and definitively
answer.)
Dr. Heine also says that a couple weeks before the massive searches of
Ivins
home, office and properties on November 1, 2007, Ivins had been on a
cruise with his brother and a nephew. And the FBI was there in
the form of two female FBI agents who spent a lot of time with Ivins,
chatting him up. No exact dates were mentioned, so I cannot add
it to his timeline. And there is nothing in the existing timeline
that even remotely suggests Ivins was on a cruise, although I don't
have any solid reason to believe it's not true. (It seems more likely that Ivins was in
some kind of addiction treatment center and just told his co-workers he
was on a cruise.) [NOTE
added June 3, 2010: It appears the cruise did happen and the women were FBI agents. Somewhere,
probably in the 2,720 pages of supplementary information, there is a
report by one of the female FBI agents. I've seen quotes from the
report, but no link to the actual document.]

Dr. Heine believes that during the nights and weekends in September and
October of 2001, when Dr. Ivins
was working alone in the labs, Dr. Ivins may have been checking on
everyone
else's experiments and spending time on the computer. Dr. Heine
says
that after 9/11 it was difficult for a lot of people to get to work,
and because Dr. Ivins lived just across the street from Ft. Detrick,
Dr. Heine believes or suspects
that Dr.
Ivins was just helping out the others by checking on their experiments
for them. Dr. Heine evidently made no attempt to verify such a
belief. It's just a possible
explanation that he chooses to believe. And it doesn't explain
why Dr. Ivins' evening and weekend hours in the lab began in August,
before 9/11. And Dr. Heine criticizes the FBI for not
checking on Dr.
Ivins' emails for September and October of 2001, clearly failing to
notice the FBI report that Dr.
Ivins' emails for all of 2001 were deleted from his computer and
Ivins couldn't explain why. (See my comment for March 23, 2010.)

There are lots and lots of other interesting bits of information in the
interview. The mp3 files make a great addition to my
archives. And I
found it very interesting that part 3 of the February 25 interview has
statements from Dr. Heine that seemingly conflict with what Dr. Heine
said in his
April 21 interview. Beginning at the 31:40 minute mark in the
February 25 interview, here is what was
said about Dr. Ivins' death:

Interviewer:
I just got an IM [Instant Message] from somebody who said "When Ivins
admitted he took the Tylenol-3 overdose, were there only government
doctors and witnesses involved there?" Do you know that?Dr.
Heine: He never admitted that's what killed him. His wife found him unconscious at home,
and he was taken to the hospital where he - you know, the liver damage
was so severe that he couldn't recover.Interviewer:
But the people who found him were the govenment doctors and witnesses,
or were they local EMS people?Dr.
Heine: I think it was
local EMS.

Beginning at the 24:15 minute mark in the April 21 interview, here is
what was said about Dr. Ivins' death:

Interviewer:
But if the FBI was watching Bruce at all times, 24/7, then they had to watch him taking the bunch
of things that killed him.Dr.
Heine: Well, if you actually read in there, you read the report,
he was actually under
observation when he committed suicide.
You can read the report. Whoever the observer was says he was in
there
alone, he was in this room and then he was in that room. I mean
there's a very detailed report. So, for all intents and
purposes, whoever that was, did
more or less watch him commit suicide.Interviewer:
Which brings up a whole 'nother list of questions there.Dr.
Heine: Yeah. It certainly does. I mean, did they see enough that they could
have intervened and perhaps gotten him to a hospital sooner?

You can read the report for yourself. It's on pages 43 and 44 of FBI
pdf file #847572. Here's what it says:

The following observations were made on July 26-27, 2008, while on
surveillance in the vicinity of XXXXX, Frederick, Maryland.

10:30P
All vehicles
present. No lights 1st floor. 2nd floor bathroom and
hallway lights on. No activity noted.12:25P No
lights 1st floor.
2nd floor bathroom and hallway lights on. No activity noted.1:15A Fire
and rescue responds to
residence.1:25A
Frederick PD reports unresponsive male found in upstairs
bathroom.
Male identified as BRUCE IVINS found on the bathroom floor, empty
orange drink container on the floor. XXXXXXXXX has history of
substance abuse problems, but all pills, specifically his XXXXXX was
accounted for. XXXXXX stated to Frederick PD,
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.
BRUCE was in his bed sleeping, she checked then checked on him again
and found him in the bathroom unconscious, not talking, she called 911.1:30A BRUCE
IVINS observed leaving
residence on stretcher.1:45A
BRUCE IVINS arrives at Frederick
Memorial Hospital Emergency Services Department via ambulance....

2:15A
Frederick PD report BRUCE IVINS will be admitted, he
had to be
paralyzed and a breathing tube was inserted, possibly some sort of
overdose.2:30A Surveillance terminated.

Clearly, the two FBI agents and the Postal Inspector doing the
surveillance
were "in the vicinity" of Ivins' home, which means they were outside,
not prowling around inside. They could see lights on, but
they say nothing about Ivins
"being there alone, he was in this room and he was in that room."
They did NOT
watch
Ivins commit suicide.

The WFMD radio interviewer seems to have started that line of
conspiracy theory
speculation, and Dr. Heine just supported it with wild
misinterpretations of his own.

That's the basic thought process for conspiracy theorists: One person
makes
some silly suggestion about evil doings by "the government," and
others
join in with wild misinterpretations
and speculations of their own. Before long, they all feel
they know exactly what
happened because they all agree that "the government" is evil and up to
no good.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, May 16,
2010, thru Saturday, May 22, 2010
May 16, 2010 - Last week was a very
quiet week. I received only a few emails, and I wasn't involved
in any forum discussions about the anthrax case. Early in the
week,
however, there was an
opinion piece in USA Today attacking the effort by a couple
politicians to keep the Times Square bomber from being allowed the
rights guaranteed to all American citizens. What attracted my
attention was the example the author of the opinion piece used to
justify his position:

Allowing the government to
decide
that certain citizens aren't entitled to constitutional protections
would set a terrible precedent. Imagine, for
example, what might have happened to Steven Hatfill, the Army scientist
falsely suspected in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

I can't read the mind of the writer of the opinion piece, but he
appears to believe that Dr. Hatfill was falsely suspected by the U.S.
government instead of by the media and a bunch of conspiracy
theorists.

Wondering if there was any way to make what really happened to Dr. Hatfill
more clear, I began thinking about The
Bruce Ivins Timeline I recently created, which truly seems to make
the sequence of events in the Ivins case very clear (to me, at
least). If anyone tries to argue that the FBI decided to
accuse Dr. Ivins after he
died, the timeline will prove
that they are talking
nonsense. If another careless reporter tries to argue that Ivins
committed suicide after he
was identified as the anthrax mailer in the media, the timeline will
show that to be total nonsense.

There's nothing better than a timeline to make clear an actual sequence
of
events.

With the Ivins timeline in mind, I began working on The Steven Hatfill Timeline.
Because there was never even a hint of a pending arrest, however,
the Hatfill Timeline depends almost entirely on news articles. I
think the Timeline does a much better job of showing how Dr. Hatfill
became a "person of interest" than the previous pages I'd written about
him. There is very little analysis involved in the
Timeline. It just
lays out the published information in order by date, providing
headlines and
quoting from articles.

The facts should speak for themselves. The facts say:

In
late 2001 and early 2002, a lynch mob
consisting of conspiracy
theorists, people from the media and a few politicians attempted to lynch an innocent man, and they now
blame the FBI for their own actions.

I did, however, stop the timeline at the end of 2002. By that time, the facts are clear. And, in
August of 2002, the news reports became so numerous that I mostly just
list them one by one without any quotes.

Those who absolutely refuse to believe that a little old lady from
Upstate New York and a bunch of amateur detectives can be responsible
for what happened to Dr. Hatfill might find the Hatfill Timeline
particularly interesting. Everyone else might also find things in
it that they didn't know - or things they'd forgotten. I
did.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, May 9,
2010, thru Saturday, May 15, 2010May
14, 2010
- I just noticed something. A month ago, on April 15, in my (A)
comment for that day, I discussed a "meeting" that took place on June
5, 2008, where Bruce Ivins mentioned to someone that the next time
Ivins would have to testify, he'd have to have a proffer (e.g., an offer to plead
guilty if
the government offered something in exchange, like not asking for the
death penalty). Today, I
noticed that
the meeting were Bruce Ivins made his "non-denial denial" (where Ivins
claimed he couldn't remember
sending out the anthrax letters) took place on that same day - June 5,
2008. Since it appears that both meetings were recorded, it seems
very likely that
there was really only one
meeting, and both reports refer to that one meeting. One report
comes from pages 66 through
69 of FBI
pdf file #847551. The other comes from pages 70 and 71 of the
FBI's summary report.

I've been working on something else I plan to put on my web site on
Sunday, and this popped up as I took a break from that other
task. I'm
not certain what to make of it. The first report seemed to
indicate
that Ivins was probably talking with a counselor at an Alcoholics
Anonymous
meeting, and the second seemed to indicate that Ivins was talking with
a
psychiatrist or psychologist - but, seemingly, not his regular
psychiatrist or psychologist. Now ..... I dunno. I'm going
to have to study the two reports some more. Maybe there's
something somewhere else that clarifies things.
May 9, 2010 - In my (A) comment for
April 23, I mentioned that I didn't fully understand something Scott
Shane had written in his New York
Times article that morning. Scott Shane had written:

In its written summation of
the
case in
February, the bureau said Dr. Ivins’s lab technicians grew anthrax
spores that the technicians incorrectly believed were added to Dr.
Ivins’s main supply flask. But the summary said the
spores were never
added to the flask, suggesting that surplus spores might have been
diverted by Dr. Ivins for the letters.

It now appears that
Scott Shane was referring to this information from page 28 of the
FBI summary:

During the time
that Dr. Ivins was transferring quantities of spores
to, for example, aerobiology for animal challenges and outside labs for
their research, lab technicians continued to make spores at the behest
of Dr. Ivins, thinking that the spores were needed to go into RMR1029. His junior lab technician
thought that the “Dugway Spores” were
exhausted, so she needed to make spores for the animal challenges. In
fact, she was under the impression that she was hired expressly for
this purpose. His senior lab technician, on the other hand, thought
that
she was continuously making spores to
add to the existing stock of “Dugway Spores.” In fact, the
investigation revealed that there were never any additions to RMR-1029
after its creation in October 1997. [see Footnote #11]

But Scott Shane seems to have failed to notice Footnote #11, which says:

Investigators
unsuccessfully attempted
to determine what happened to
these spores. However, there is no evidence that RMR-1029 was
the
parent material to these new spores, as the laboratory technicians were
utilizing frozen stock of Bacillus anthracis – and not liquid
suspension such as RMR-1029 – as the parent material for their new
spore preparations. In addition, the technique they used to grow
new
spores, known as a “single-colony pick,” would not produce genetically
identical material to the parent material, making it extremely unlikely
that these missing spores were utilized in the anthrax attacks.

Hmmm. Not only didn't Ivins' supervisors (like Dr. Henry Heine)
know what
Ivins
was doing, but it now appears that Dr. Ivins' lab techicians were
making anthrax spores for him without actually knowing what use Ivins
would
make of the
spores. Scott Shane seems to be suggesting that those spores
might have
gone into the attack letters, even though the FBI investigation
indicated that the spores made by Ivins' technicians were made
from frozen bacteria or frozen spores and NOT from any "seed spores"
taken from flask RMR-1029.

Okay. So, what happened to all those spores Ivins' technicians
were making? Evidently, there is no clear record of what happened
to them. No doubt, most or all
of the spores were put to
some
proper and authorized use.
But, the point is: Everyone simply trusted
that Dr. Ivins was putting
the spores to some proper and authorized use.

It's been abundantly clear for a long time that Ivins' supervisors
didn't
know what Ivins was doing in his lab at night or on weekends,
and they simply
trusted that he was doing something that was proper and
authorized.

And now we appear to have testimony that the technicians working for
Bruce Ivins
didn't know
what Ivins was telling them to do doing during normal work hours.
In fact, it now seems even possible that they could have helped Dr. Ivins make the attack
anthrax during normal
work hours without realizing that was what they were
doing. And, obviously, Dr. Ivins' superiors wouldn't have
realized it
either.

While records seem to indicate that Ivins' lab technicians were working
with frozen bacteria or
frozen spores when making stocks of new
spores for Dr. Ivins, it still seems very likely that, if Ivins had
given
them samples from flask RMR-1029 on some occasion and asked that a
couple trillion new spores be grown from them, his technicians would
simply have done as they were told without asking any questions.

That kind of trickery and/or manipulation of others seems very
consistent with Ivins' personality and with other actions taken by
Ivins before and after the anthrax attacks.

The facts clearly say that
Ivins
manipulated or tricked someone else
into writing the anthrax letters and addressing the envelopes.
All Bruce Ivins did was put the powders into the letters and mail them.

Now it appears to be at least somewhat possible that Dr. Ivins may not
have
actually made the
senate
anthrax spores himself. He may have tricked or manipulated his
technicians into making
them
for him. All Bruce Ivins may have done was to dry the spores and
put them into the letters.

If there had been a trial, I don't know if the Department of Justice
prosecutors would even have
bothered to
mention such a possibility to the jury. It would probably have
been
sufficient to show that Ivins could have made the attack anthrax spores
by himself at
night and
on weekends or even during the day without being questioned. The
idea that Ivins could have
manipulated his techicians into helping him
without their knowing it, is something an experienced prosecutor would
let the jurors realize all by themselves.

The facts about the handwriting say
that Ivins didn't write the letters and didn't
address the envelopes. Now we see he may not have made the spores
used in the senate letters, either. That made me think about how
Dr. Ivins might pass a lie detector test if the examiner didn't phrase
the questions in the right way. And that reminded me of something
else I'd noticed in the
FBI's summary of the case. I was reminded of the footnote at
the bottom of page 84:

When [Ivins] took a
polygraph in
connection with the investigation in 2002, the examiner determined that
he passed. However, as the investigation began to hone in on Dr. Ivins
and investigators learned that he had been prescribed a number of
psychotropic medications at the time of the 2002 polygraph,
investigators resubmitted his results to examiners at FBI Headquarters
and the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute for a reassessment of
the results in light of that new information. Both examiners who
independently reassessed the results determined that Dr. Ivins
exhibited “classic” signs of the use of countermeasures to pass a
polygraph. At the time the polygraph was initially examined in
2002, not all examiners were trained to spot countermeasures, making
the first analysis both understandable under the circumstances, and
irrelevant to the subsequent conclusion that he used countermeasures.

Wondering if Ivins could have learned how to defeat the polygraph test
by doing a Google search, I found an interesting article on
the subject by doing a Google search. The article contains
this information:

It’s worth noting that if
Ivins
had Googled “how to beat a polygraph” in 2002, he likely would
have found AntiPolygraph.org’s on-line book, The
Lie Behind the Lie Detector [1 mb PDF], which explains
precisely how to do so.

Conspiracy theorists and True believers, of course, see
everything very differently.

In a
conversation awhile ago, I mentioned the possibility that the powders in the
media letters could have been made from unsterilized biological
cultures that had
been allowed
to accumulate for a week or more in Dr. Ivins' autoclave. Someone
immediately jumped on that idea as proof that even the janitor could have had
access to the materials to make the anthrax in the letters. To
him, it was further proof that the
FBI had no case
against Bruce Ivins.

In reality, it changes nothing about anyone else. It only shows how easily Bruce Ivins
could have done it. Anyone else would still need to have had
Ivins' expertise at making spores, Ivins' mistaken belief that the spores in flask RMR-1029
were untraceable, Ivins' unsupervised access to lab
materials and equipment, Ivins'
vaccinations which gave him immunity to anthrax, Ivins' secretive personality, Ivins' talents for deception, Ivins'
interest in codes, and Ivins'
bizarre desire to become a hero by sending out letters which contained
lethal anthrax spores in order to warn America of the dangers of a
bioweapons attack by Muslim terrorists.

There do not appear to be
"two sides" to this argument. There are
only the
facts and those who do not believe
the
facts. Disbelieving the facts is NOT an argument.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, May 2,
2010, thru Saturday, May 1, 2010
May 6, 2010 - The Frederick
News-Post's web site has a video of Dr. Henry Heine repeating his
belief that Ivins would have had to make spores for "week on end,
week after week after week" to create what was in the anthrax
letters. It appears that some in the media will be repeating this
total nonsense
until it becomes "an accepted fact."

May 5, 2010 - While paging through
the FBI's
summary of the Amerithrax investigation, I noticed on page 83 it
says Ivins hand-delivered the second set of
slants from flask RMR-1029 to the FBI repository on Wednesday, April
10, 2002. (These
were the false slants that
were supposed to replace the incorrectly
prepared slants Ivins
made from flask RMR-1029 in February 2002.) The date confirms
what
I'd suspected: The subpoena to supply new slants from flask
RMR-1029 came shortly before
the unauthorized swabbing and cleaning on April 15 & 16. In
other
words, the second swabbing and cleaning was almost certainly prompted
by the
subpoena asking for new slants from RMR-1029.

May 4, 2010 - Hmm. I awoke
this morning thinking how two runs of 433 billion spores per run equals
an amount that is pretty close to the 871 billion spores that were in
the Leahy letter. The difference is less than one half of one
percent.

So, even using the complex techniques used to create the spores in
flasks RMR-1029 and RMR-1030, Ivins could have created the spores in
the Leahy letter in 2 weeks if he did one run per week, or 1 week if he
did two runs per week. And, either way, it would have involved
only four (4) liters of culture. And the Daschle letter would be
the same.

Yet, we have The New
York Times and a bunch of others in the media all mindlessly repeating Dr. Henry
Heine's claim that it would have taken "at least a year" to create the
powders in those two letters. Only Science
magazine questioned the highly-questionable information.

I didn't include the powders in the media letters in those calculations
because the media powders were very
different. The media powders were very crude. They were
reportedly only about 10 percent spores, with the remaining 90 percent
being sporulation debris (dead bacteria, dead spores and dried growth
media). Even Dr. Henry Heine would probably have to
admit that the media powders could
have been created in a few days. There's even a possibility that
those spore powders didn't need to be "created" at all, since Dr. Ivins
may have been able
to simply dig them out of his trash before the trash was sterilized in
the autoclaves.

It
was documented during several
interviews that Ivins' group did not keep room XXX very clean and tidy.Post-challenge agar plates were left on
counters, the incubators were
left full of material, samples in the
refrigerator were not disposed of in a timely manner, and "hot" trash was allowed to build up for
weeks prior to being
autoclaved.One former military
aerobiology technician XXXXX commented that XXXXX had to clean Ivins'
trash
himself out of safety concerns.XXXXX
said that civilians at USAMRIID did not take safety seriously.XXXXX commented that when XXXXX looked at
agar plates that had sat in the biohazard trash bags for several days
or weeks
in 115, they were covered with bacterial growth.

XXXXX
said that XXXXX had seen the
post-challenge plates of B.a Ames after they
had been sitting in room XXX of Building XXXX at USAMRIID
for an extended amount of time in the trash bags. XXXXXdescribed the plates
as being
completely covered with growth.

And page 19 of that same
pdf file says:

The bags
would remain in room XXX
until nearly overflowing, or until the number of bags in the room
became an
obstruction.The bags often sat in room
XXX for several days or weeks prior to being removed.XXXXX noted that XXXXX was fascinated with
how much growth appeared on the plates after several days or weeks.The bags were taken to the basement to be
autoclaved.The bags were placed into
metal garbage cans in the basement, next to the autoclave, in case
there was a
leak in the bag.

There may be some
scientific fact which could prove that the media powders could NOT have
been created from this accumulated trash. For example, the
fact that there was silicon in about the same percentage of media
spores as senate spores seems
to indicate that, at some point in time, the same or similar growth
methods were used for both mailings. Also, the trash would have
to include materials grown from spores taken from flask RMR-1029.
These are the types of questions
that the review from the National Academies of Science should be able
to definitively answer.

Too bad no one in the media thought to ask Dr. Henry Heine if the media
powders could have been created from the "hot" trash that was just
lying around in the areas he supervised.
May 2-3, 2010
- Hmm. When conspiracy theorists and True Believers claim I'm
wrong,
about 99 percent of the time it's because they do not believe the facts
or simply do not believe me. But, there is that 1 percent of the
time
when they are right. A
scientist
on Lew
Weinstein's web sitewho is currently calling himself
"Anonymous" says that the
contents of flask RMR-1029 were not
created to be "seed" spores as
I argued a few days ago. He says, "The records clearly show that the aliquots
removed were used DIRECTLY for wet aerosol nebulization."

In the
e-mail,
Ivins calculated the
amount of cultures needed and the time it would take to produce enough spores
for aerosol challenges of 1000 rabbits and 200 monkeys.Ivins concluded that the concentration of
spores for each animal was based on what he and others in his group
administered (or tried to administer) to the monkeys and rabbits in
F96-16 and
F97-17 or3.0 E9.Ivins prepared 8.5
milliliters of aerosol per animal, or about 8 milliliters per
tube.Ultimately, Ivins calculated that it
took 13
runs to generate about 3.0 E12 Ames spores for the "current
batch."Since they needed ten times
that amount, it would take them 130 runs with the flasks if performed
with 2
liters per run, as they currently did.Therefore,
it would take 130 weeks at one run per week or
65 weeks at 2
runs per week.The total amount of
culture needed to produce the spores would be 260 liters.

3.0 E9? Uh oh. It's another one of those
scientific numbers. According to Wikipedia
it translates to 3.0 x 10 to the 9th or 30 billion. So, 1
milliliter
from flask RMR-1029 was enough to aerosol challenge just one
(1) animal. The milliliter of spores taken from flask RMR-1029
would
be diluted with liquid to create 8.5 milliliters of aerosol. (I
have
no idea what "8 milliliters per tube" means.)

Ivins calculated,

it
took 13
runs to generate about 3.0 E12 Ames
spores for the "current
batch."

and

it would take 130 weeks at
one run per week or
65 weeks at 2
runs per week

"3.0 E12" is 3 x 10 to the 12th or, in layman's terms, 3 trillion
spores. If it took them 13 runs to create 3 trillion spores for
the "current batch" (most likely meaning batch RMR-1030), that
means they were creating about 433 billion spores per run using 2
liters of culture per run.

They created more than what
was in the anthrax letters in 13 weeks when doing just 1 run per
week. 2 runs per week would be 7 or 8 weeks. No matter how
you look at it, it's nowhere near a
year.

And
what was the immediate need? They evidently didn't have 1,200
animals ready to test. In
1998, they only used 1 milliliter. In 1999, only 5
milliliters. The
material in flask RMR-1029 was used over a period of five years or more.

The Reference
Material Receipt Record (see FBI
pdf file #847447, pages 110 & 111) shows that quantities
ranging
from 1 milliliter to 100 milliliters were taken out of flask RMR-1029
from September 17, 1998 until November 18, 2003, and there were still
some spores left over.
There are at least three reports which say that Ivins and his team were
creating a
trillion
spores per week. That's what made me think they were using the
spores from RMR-1029 as "seed" spores. But now it appears they
were using the spores from flask RMR-1029 for one kind of
testing and creating NEW spores for some other kind or kinds of
testing. There are a lot of irrelevant
details
here, details which have nothing
to do with the anthrax
attacks.

However, "Anonymous" concludes:

Lake understandably
realizes this
means Dr Henry Heine is precisely correct – it would have taken more
than a year of continuous work to make such a quantity of spores at
Detrick.

That is absolutely false, of course. It doesn't change anything, because Ivins and his
staff were making a trillion
spores per week at Ft. Detrick, and there were less than
3 trillion
spores in the attack letters. Plus, even when making the 30
trillion
spores in flask RMR-1029, it didn't require a year of work to create
just 3 trillion spores, a tenth
of the total.

We just don't know why it took so
long to create the 30 trillion spores in flask RMR-1029. Was it
because they had to be "Good Laboratory Practices" spores? That
seems to be the best guess for now.

We also know that Leighton-Doi protocols played a role in the creation
of the spores in the attack letters. The spores in flask RMR-1029
did NOT contain silicon,
and they were evidently NOT
created using Leighton-Doi protocols. Some of the spores in flask
RMR-1030 did contain silicon
and were created using
Leighton-Doi
protocols.
So, the
attack spores have more to do with the way flask RMR-1030 was created
than the way flask RMR-1029 was created. RMR-1029 merely provided
the
"seed spores" for the attack anthrax powders.

There was no intention on my part to "muddy the waters," as "Anonymous"
claims in his post. I just haven't deciphered all
of the intricacies of what was
going on in the anthrax vaccine testing being done at Fr.
Detrick. My
focus has been only on the information needed to confirm who sent the
anthrax
letters. This error doesn't change that in any way.
It just tells me
to avoid getting too far off track. I don't need to know every detail
of how spores were created at Ft. Detrick in order to confirm or
dispute the FBI's findings
regarding who sent the anthrax letters.

Lake himself is a
scientifically
illiterate retiree from Racine, WI – a 70-something with no scientific
training – who gleefully takes to the internet and his website to
promulgate the information being fed to him – mostly by tax-payer
funded anonymous government officials and/or academics with agendas.

And

He also, regularly, has
“anonymous scientists” email him with “talking points” that always seem
to support the FBI’s case. But, strangely enough, he never gives these
anonymous scientist’s names.

That seems a strange complaint from someone who calls himself
"Anonymous" or "Anonymous Scientist" in order to hide his identity.

The mistakes I make are my
mistakes, not mistakes by the scientists who graciously try to help me
understand the intricacies of growing spores and testing
vaccines. Yet, in
that thread, "Anonymous" criticizes Dr. Adam Driks for
seemingly supporting my findings by
telling Science
magazine that it would take only a "number of days" to
create the spores in the attack letters. And he criticizes other
scientists for helping "the likes of Ed Lake."

Some
time ago, "Anonymous" was using the name "Anonymous Scientist" when
he wrote:

The BS from Lake gets
higher and deeper. He’s now saying his deductions are better than
anyone else’s because his are based on “facts”. In other words, he’s
claiming he’s smarter than anyone else.
Is that why he lives in a tiny apartment complex and drives a twenty
year old car?

Hmm. Evidently, to "Anonymous" a.k.a. "Anonymous Scientist,"
driving an "old car" makes you dumb and driving a new car makes you
smart. He probably considers that to be a very "scientific"
observation.

An Old Man And His Old Car

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, April 25,
2010, thru Saturday, May 1, 2010
May 1, 2010 - This morning's Frederick
News-Post contains another opinion piece by lawyer/conspiracy
theorist Barry Kissin repeating once again the total nonsense Dr. Henry Heine gave
to the media early in the week. The objective, apparently, is to
repeat the same absurd nonsense over and over until you manage to
convince someone. After all, there are still some people who believe that if
it's printed in black and white in the newspaper, there must be some truth in it.
There may have been a time when such a belief was justified, but no
longer. Here is part of Mr. Kissin's opinion:

Heine has explained very
clearly exactly why it would have been impossible to make "these
samples" at USAMRIID. One element of his proof is that with the
production equipment available at USAMRIID, it would have taken Ivins a minimum of
50 weeks just to grow enough anthrax to fill the letters.
Roughly speaking, about 25 gallons (200 pounds) of anthrax slurry would
then have to be refined into powder
weighing about 1 pound -- composed of pure spores -- about 10 trillion
of them -- and treated with a silicon-based additive to promote
dispersability and thus deadliness.

The point here is not only
that there would be absolutely no way for Ivins to pull this off -- the
point is also that this impossibility would have been obvious --
painfully obvious -- to anyone conducting an honest investigation.

Wow! He's claiming
there was a pound of spores
in the letters? A pound?!
Where do these conspiracy theorists get
such ridiculous nonsense?
Here's some information that Mr. Kissin needs to study and remember:

1 pound = 453.59237 grams.

1 trillion anthrax spores weigh one (1) gram.

The Leahy letter contained .871 grams of spores (7/8ths of one gram).

Dr.
Ivins' staff routinely made
one trillion spores
per week.

And, of course, as
everyone should know by now, there was NO
"silicon-based additive" in the attack anthrax "to promote
dispersability and thus deadliness." That has been proven in every way
imaginable. But, evidently, there is no way to convince the
conspiracy
theorists. To a conspiracy theorist, finding someone who agrees
with their opinion is enough to dismiss all the facts in the world as
being nothing more than "what the government wants people to believe."

Are you going to believe the facts? Or are you going to believe
someone who agrees with you? Your choice.

IVINS' laboratory group has been
producing one trillion Bacillus anthracis
(B.a.) Ames spores per week using the Leighton and
Doi protocol.They have not used
fermentation in the production of these spores.

The use of Leighton-Doi
media appears to be a key factor when growing spores for
quantity. Leighton-Doi also seems to have some kind of connection
to the presence of silicon in the spore coats.
April 29, 2010 (A) - While looking
for
something else, as I was going
through the notes I took when studying the 2,728 pages of
supplementary FBI documents released on February 19, 2010, I found
a note which led me to this information on page 1 of pdf file
#847423:

XXXXX
used to grow XXXXXXX would have
used IVINS' spore stock as [her] seed stock for each batch, and would
have
initially streaked it on a plate, and isolated one colony to grow the
batch.IVINS' spore stock was kept in a
tube in the
walk-in refrigerator and was not frozen.XXXXXX
would have gone back to the same stock to
start each batch,
rather than to plate from the previous batch.Although
[she] was not certain what the sample name
was for the seed
stock that [she] used, [she] knew that it would have been the same as
what
IVINS used for his seed stock.Specific
batch information could be found in IVINS' laboratory notebooks.Approximately 100
milliliters (mL) of spores
were being produced per week at a concentration of 8.5 x 10 [to the
8th] or
10 [to the 9th] and up to approximately 10 [to the 11th] spores per mL.

Utilizing my
newly-gathered
confidence in translating such numbers, let's see if I can translate
that last sentence into layman's language. Here is what was
actual written in the FBI report:

My translation: Approximately 100 milliliters (mL) of spores were
being produced per week at a concentration of 8.5 billion or 10 billion
and up to approximately 100 billion
spores per mL.

100 milliliters per week at 8.5 billion spores per milliliter comes to
850 billion spores per week. At 10 billion spores per milliliter,
it comes to 1
trillion spores per
week. Both figures seem totally reasonable.

But 100 milliliters of
spores per week at 100 billion spores per milliliter is 10 trillion
spores per week. That can't be right. Uh oh. I'm
losing my confidence again. However, I suspect the FBI agent who
wrote the report meant 11 to the 9th instead of 10 to the 11th, in
other words: 11
billion spores per mL. That would be 1.1 trillion spores per week.
That fits with the rest of the sentence, and it would jibe with the
other report (FBI pdf
file #847423, page 5) which
said that - at a different time - Ivins was making "nearly a trillion
spores a week."

Am I the only one who thinks that it would have been better if they'd
just used layman's language?

But, this further shows that the claims by Dr. Henry Heine and various
conspiracy theorists that it would have taken Ivins a year or more to create the less
than 3 trillion spores in the anthrax letters are total nonsense.
April 28, 2010 - I screwed up
yesterday when I wrote that flask RMR-1029 contained 3 trillion spores. It
actually contained 30
trillion spores. I just went back and fixed that comment.
The fix makes it even more
certain that Ivins could have created the anthrax powders all by
himself. Here's what is says on the control sheet for flask
RMR-1029:

There is also no rational dispute that the total quantities of
purified spores in the anthrax letters were of the same order of
magnitude as the total quantities of purified spores specified in the
Dugway contracts. Actual spore counts of the powder materials in
the anthrax mailings establish beyond any reasonable question that the
total quantities of purified spores in all of the anthrax mailings
exceeded 10 X 10e12 spores (i.e., 1 X 10e13) — a total quantity of
about 40 X 10e12 (4 X 10e13) would be reasonable. The Dugway contracts,
on the other hand, specified spore quantities of the same order of
magnitude, i.e., 10e13 total spores.

We therefore know from real facts, in the real world,
that the spores in the anthrax
letters would have required a production time of around two years if
made at USARMIID.

So, I began wondering if I was
translating the number on the control sheet correctly. I
have zero confidence when deciphering those kinds of numbers. I'd
screwed
up once before, and the same
conspiracy theorist really jumped on me because of it. So, I was
concerned that I had screwed up again. I tried typing the
"number"
into Google, but I couldn't get anything that helped. I tried
asking a scientist who had
helped me in the past, but he was
traveling and his Blackberry couldn't find the page numbers on the
.pdf file that contained the number in question. He responded
that "In the several
places where the concentration of
spores in the RMR 1030 flask is cited it is generally 2-3 times
ten to
the tenth per ml." Great. What does that mean?
In the Roundtable
discussion of August 18, 2008, a scientist had guessed the original number of
spores in flask RMR-1029 to be ONE trillion. I was tired and
running out
of time. I had written everything in
yesterday's comment except for the number of spores in flask
RMR-1029. Finally, I decided to err on the side of caution, and I
used the 3 trillion number. I figured that someone would point
out my
error if I'd made an
error. And the correction - if any - would help my argument that Ivins could
have made the spores in the anthrax letters.

This morning, sure enough, on Lew Weinstein's web site, someone
pointed out my error. And I'd had a good night's sleep,
so I was thinking a lot more clearly. To verify what I'd just
been told, I typed "ten
to the tenth" into Google, and it told me "ten to the tenth = ten
billion." Okay!
So there were originally thirty (30)
trillion spores in flask RMR-1029, just as I'd stated on Monday
-- 30 billion spores per milliliter in a flask containing 1,000
milliliters.

When arguing with scientists with strong opinions, it seems they will always try to confuse
non-scientists
by using terms and data that the non-scientist might not know or be
able to
contradict. I probably won't make that kind of mistake
again. If I'm uncertain about the translation of a number, I can
come back to this comment to see how I handled it.

April 27-28, 2010 - Even the
scientific
media seems determined to repeat the mistakes they made back in 2002
when they falsely reported that the attack spores were weaponized with
silica, and they joined in the chorus pointing the finger at Dr.
Hatfill, an innocent man. Here's a new article from the web site
for Physics
Today magazine:

Co-worker
says Ivins didn't make anthrax letter spores

By Physics
Today on April 27, 2010 8:52 AM

The Frederick News-Post
Online: It is absolutely
impossible that Bruce Ivins, accused of mailing anthrax and killing
five people in 2001, could have created and cleaned up anthrax spores
in the timeline and manner the FBI alleges, Ivins' former co-worker
said last Thursday.

The National Academy of
Sciences brought in former USAMRIID microbacteriologist Henry Heine to
explain spore preparation to the panel, which is tasked with
investigating the science the FBI used to accuse Ivins, also a former
microbacteriologist for the US Army Medical Research Institute of
Infectious Diseases.

And though Heine discussed
only scientific methods and technologies before the panel, he said
afterward he firmly believes Ivins did not and could not have grown and
prepared the anthrax.

It's the blind leading the
blind. Scientists with opinions
telling reporters total nonsense, and the science reporters blindly
report it because it's an opinion
from "a knowledgeable scientist."

Part of the problem with understanding how long it took to create the
spores in the anthrax letters seems to stem from the fact that there
are different methods and
different reasons for making
spores.

According to the "Reference
Material Receipt Record" for flask RMR-1029, it originally
contained 30 trillion spores.
It was stated at the
August 18, 2008 Roundtable discussion that those spores were the
result of 13 production runs done at Dugway Proving Grounds and 22
production runs done at Ft. Detrick, which produced 164 liters of spore
production, which was then concentrated down to about one liter.

According to The
New York Times, the Leahy letter contained .871 grams of spores, or
roughly 871 billion spores. If you assume that there was
originally 1 gram of spores in the letter before some of the material
was lost in
transit, and if you assume the Daschle letter contained the same
amount, with the five media letter powders being roughly 10 per spores
and 90 percent debris, that produces a rough figure ofsomewhat
less than 3 trillion spores total. For the
sake of this discussion, let's say the seven anthrax letters contained 3 trillion spores total orone
tenth of flask RMR-1029's original quantity.

How could it have taken so many production runs to create the contents
of flask RMR-1029 while Ivins could create a tenth of it all by himself
in a few days
working alone? That's what some people (including scientists) do
not understand.

The answer seems to be in
the reason
the spores were created. The spores in flask RMR-1029 were
created to be
"seed" spores for use by Ivins when he needed to inoculate flasks of
media in order to produce "production"
spores for vaccine testing. Because they were "seed"
spores, they needed to be extraordinarily
pure. No contamination. No mutations (or so Ivins
thought). And as close to 100% viable as possible. That's
difficult to do if you grow Bacillus
anthracis bacteria in large quantities. Any
contamination would ruin the entire
batch. A stray mutation could ruin the entire batch. So, you do
many smaller runs and test each run to make sure it contains no
contamination and no mutations. Any batch which contains
contamination or mutations gets tossed out.

Note
added May 2, 2010: While the contents of flask RMR-1029 were
used as "seed spores" for the attack powders, and they may have
occasionally been used as "seed spores" for other things, they were NOT created to be "seed spores." They were
created to be used DIRECTLY in aerosol challenges. But, they were
still created using different methods
than other spores created at Ft. Detrick. See my comment for May
2, 2010 for additional details.

Ivins
noted that he is making nearly
1 trillion spores a week for USAMRIID, the National Institute of
Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the Centers for Disease
Control
(CDC), etc.

And on page 7 there's this:

IVINS
explained that since RMR-1029 were Good
Laboratory Practices
(GLP) spores, they were not accessible to many people.

Apparently "Good
Laboratory Practices" are NOT the way spores are normally created,
because when Dr. Ivins wasn't creating such spores, he could routinely
create
"nearly a trillion spores a week."
The spores created using "Good
Laboratory Practices" were used to
"seed" or inoculate flasks of nutrients where the vegetating bacteria
would be
allowed to reproduce overnight using procedures which were developed to
create large quantities of spores as fast as possible while still
assuring that the quality of the seed spores would be reflected in the
quality of the production spores. Those procedures where clearly
very different from the "Good Laboratory Practices" used to create the
spores in flask RMR-1029.

The goal for the spores in flask RMR-1029 was quality.

The goal for the production runs using the seed spores from flask
RMR-1029 was quantity.

Scientist after scientist is telling me via emails that it is NOT
difficult for a lone scientist to create a trillion spores in a few
days. You just need to follow procedures designed more for
quantity than quality.

When the anthrax mailer was making anthrax spores all by himself at
night and on weekends, quantity
was definitely his main priority, not quality. (The senate spores
were good, but NOT absolutely pure.) One scientist sent me the
1984 report which showed that creating a billion Bacillus subtilis spores per
milliliter (a trillion spores per liter) is routine, and it happens in
24 hours. Bacillus subtilis
bacteria doubles in 40 minutes. Bacillus
anthracisAmes
bacteria doubles in 20
minutes. For an experienced microbioloist, creating the attack
spores in a few days was definitely NOT "impossible."
April 26, 2010 - Before I forget, I
need to make a
comment about a
conversation I had on Lew Weinstein's forum last week. In the
conversation, I had mentioned that there is a difference between knowing someone is guilty and proving in a court of law that a
person is guilty. Someone then asked if knowing someone is guilty is the
same as having a theory that
someone is guilty. The answer, of course, is absolutely
NOT. Theories aren't about facts. Theories are
usually based upon past experiences when there aren't any solid facts
to work with. Example: The initial theory in the anthrax case was
that al Qaeda sent the letters, because the anthrax mailings happened
so soon after 9/11. When the facts began to accumulate, however,
it became very clear that al Qaeda was NOT behind the anthrax
attacks. There was also a theory that the mailer must live in
Central New Jersey, since experience says that a culprit doesn't
typically drive long distances to a specific area twice to
commit crimes. But no facts could be found to prove that theory, either.

My new supplemental page "The Bruce Ivins
Timeline" seems to show when the investigators at the FBI knew that they had found the
anthrax killer. You can almost pinpoint the exact date:
Thursday, July 28, 2005.

There are possible dates before that, too. But, as I've said many
times, the FBI is not a Borg
Collective. It is not
an organization where everyone thinks exactly alike, and when someone
learns something, everyone else automatically and immediately learns
it, too.

On Monday, May 9, 2005, someone in the FBI submitted a request for all
files everyone had on Bruce Ivins. That certainly seems
like someone decided that they knew
who sent the anthrax letters.

On Thursday, March 31, 2005, Ivins is interviewed and questioned in
such a way that Ivins notified the FBI that the next time they wanted
to interview him, Ivins wanted his lawyer to be present. That
could mean something, too.

But Thursday, July 28, 2005 seems to be a date when everyone at the FBI knew Ivins was the killer. On
that date the FBI checked Ivins home to see if anything unusual was
going on or if there were any unknown vehicles parked there.
There wasn't. That means nothing by itself. But, then the
FBI seems to go into "stealth mode" for a year and a
half, and there is almost nothing related to Bruce Ivins until
Thursday, January 30, 2007.
It appears the investigators at the FBI knew they had the culprit, but the
attorneys at the Department of Justice felt they still didn't have
enough evidence to convict Bruce Ivins in a court of law.

What was happening during that year and a half? The scientists
assisting the FBI were finalizing the examination of the 1,070 Ames
anthrax samples obtained from 15 or so labs around the world, and they
were discovering that the scientific evidence from the 1,0707 samples
led directly to Dr. Ivins'
flask RMR-1029. That flask was the
murder weapon. And at some point in time in 2006 they
realized/discovered that Paul Keim at Arizona State University (ASU)
still had his copy of the
slants that Ivins had created in February of 2002. That February,
Ivins had preparedtwo slants from the
material in flask RMR-1029, however, he had improperly prepared the two
slants, and, therefore, they were not useable in court. Because
the FBI's slant was unuseable in court, the FBI had destroyed it.
But Paul Keim still had his copy. And when examined, they found
it contained the four key mutations, yet the false replacement slants that Ivins
had prepared in April that were also
supposed to be from flask RMR-1029 did
not have the mutations. Gotcha! Ivins had deliberately tried to mislead the
investigation. That's consciousness of
guilt.

But, like all prosecutors, the prosecutors in the Department of Justice
always want more evidence. The real clincher was the "smoking
gun" the FBI investigators found after the thorough search of Ivins'
home, Ivins' office, Ivins' vehicles and Ivins' safe deposit box on the
evening and night of November 1-2, 2007. Frightened by the
searches, a few days later, on November 8, Bruce Ivins threw away the
materials which explained the hidden code
he'd put in the media letters. When those materials were examined
and it was realized what they contained, the prosecutors clearly had a solid case. They knew who sent the anthrax letters and they could prove it in court.

Yes, there is a difference between knowing
someone is guilty and proving it in
a court of law. And it has nothing to do with any theory.

April 25, 2010 (B) - In past months,
I've mentioned a
few times that I have been thinking about writing another book about
the anthrax case. I even tentatively titled it "Analyzing the
Anthrax Attacks - Beliefs vs. Facts." But, actual
publication seems very
unlikely to happen. I have no plans to self-publish again, and
regular book publishers aren't really interested in a book by some guy
on the Internet they have never heard of. They
also don't like the idea of publishing a book when nearly all the
information is available for free on a web site. And, they don't
like the idea of publishing a book that is critical of the media and
therefore unlikely to get many good reviews from the media. Plus,
my first book was far from being a "best seller," which is another reason to not publish a new version.

Events of the past week also made something else very clear: Even if I
was thinking of writing a new book, I couldn't
finish it until after the National Academies of Science
(NAS) publishes their review of the science of the Amerithrax
case. There are just too many "Beliefs vs Facts" that need
verification by the NAS.

Plus, the flood of news articles and all the heated discussions last
week showed me that the media isn't finished with writing pure crap
about the case. The nonsensical stories they wrote accusing Dr.
Hatfill in the early years of the case are now being supplemented by
nonsensical stories suggesting that Dr. Ivins was innocent. They
used uninformed opinions from people with agendas for their first round
of nonsense, and now they're
using uninformed opinions from people with agendas for their second
round of nonsense.
Facts don't matter.

Of course, it's much easier to get interviews with angry scientists who
have uninformed opinions than with careful scientists who have solid
facts. The former group will hunt reports down to talk with them,
the latter don't have time to talk with reporters who will probably
twist and distort what they say.

Anyway, there's something I've been hesitant to put on this web site
because I wanted to save it for the new book. But, now it doesn't
seem to matter. (If I do
decide to self-publish, it will probably be only enough copies to be
certain that two copies will go into the Library of Congress for
posterity.) So, I've just added a new supplemental page
titled "The Bruce Ivins Timeline."
It's a reference guide to everything about the Ivins investigation that
I can associate with a specific date or general time
period. It allows the reader to step through the sequence
of events, seeing when Ivins did things, when the FBI interviewed him,
when the FBI started putting surveillance on Ivins' home, etc.

The Timeline answers a lot of questions, but it poses a few, too.
For example, almost nothing happened in the last half of 2005 and all
of 2006.
Why? That seems to be when the investigators knew that Ivins was the culprit,
but they also knew they didn't have enough proof for the DOJ
prosecutors to be absolutely certain
of a conviction. That period also seems to be when the focus of the
Investigation turned to finalizing
and analyzing all the accumulated information gathered about the
mutations in FBI's repository of 1,070 samples of the Ames strain -
probably to see if the solid proof against Ivins could be found
there. (The solid proof was
found on November 7, 2007.)

I had hoped to have a different supplemental page done by now.
It's
the page I'm calling "Bruce Ivins and The Murder of Bob Stevens."
It's like the Timeline, but it only
steps through the events from August of 2001 through mid-October 2001,
showing how Dr. Ivins displayed his "consciousness of guilt" by
destroying evidence and supplying false evidence. It explains
that period in much greater detail. It's taking me
longer than I expected because I keep having to get inside the head of
Dr. Ivins to try to figure out why he did certain things and what he
appears to have been thinking at the time. I don't want to do too
much "mind reading." I want the data
to show what he was thinking.

There are a couple other supplemental pages I'm considering, too.
They would be like additional chapters of the new book that I'm not
likely to get published. However, although the book might never
get published, that doesn't mean it won't get mostly written. It
will just be in
web format instead of book format.

(Some chapters from
my first book can be
carried over to the new book almost word for word:

Except for Chapter 15, the material in
the other chapters isn't on this web site except in piecemeal fashion
scattered about in comments and supplemental pages that I've written
over the years.)

The process of writing helps me think things through and to make sense
of everything.

The case against Dr. Ivins is solid and makes perfect sense. But
sometimes I stumble across things that seem to need further
investigation and a
the writing of a detailed explanation to make sure I understand every
implication.
For example, one thing that I need to wait for the NAS report to
clarify is the way Ivins stored live growth plates in the autoclave for
weeks at a time. The facts suggest to me that Ivins could have
prepared powders for the media letters by simply taking
not-yet-sterilized materials out of the autoclave and perhaps cleaning
up the
spores a bit. I can't see any problem with that, but I'm
wondering if the NAS can.

It’s an article about Bacillus subtilis, but the
principles can be applied to Bacillus
anthracis.

The scientist explained to me
that the report shows that they grew spores in a 300 milliliter flask.

They diluted the spore
material in the flask 100 times to do the spore counts. They counted 1
to 2 billion spores in the diluted sample. That equates to 300 to 600
billion spores in the 300 milliliter flask.

The scientist confirms that
that means that you would get 1 trillion to 2 trillion spores in a 1
liter flask. In 24 hours.

And he confirmed that would
be equivalent to about 1 gram of dried spores.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, April 18,
2010, thru Saturday, April 24, 2010
April 24, 2010 - It's deja vu all
over again! The media is repeating
the early days of the Amerithrax investigation! Now, instead of
listening to Barbara Hatch Rosenberg claiming that the FBI is covering
up for Dr. Hatfill and some secret and illegal U.S. government
bioweapons program, as they did in 2002, the media is listening to Dr.
Henry Heine claim that Dr. Ivins is innocent because Dr. Ivins didn't
have the ability to weaponize
the attack spores with silica, and it would have been impossible for it to have happened
right under Dr. Heine's nose.

In 2002, the media was reporting that the FBI was covering up for the
anthrax killer.
In 2010, the media is reporting that the FBI has still failed to catch
the anthrax killer.

How can the media be so wrong again? It's because
they listen to scientist sources with impressive credentials who tell
them bullshit stories that make good headlines. They do not
bother to look at the facts.

To be fair, however, just like back in 2002, there are a few in the media who are looking
beyond the opinions of scientists with agendas. In 2002 there
were
a few media reports which questioned all the attention being paid to
Dr. Hatfill, who had NOT been charged with any crime. And now
there is the Science magazine article "Ex-USAMRIID
Scientist Defends Bruce Ivins Using Back-of-the-Envelope Math"
which lays out a few facts which dispute the claims by Dr. Heine.
And there is a "Dick Destiny" article titled "Matsumoto
and Anthrax Conspiracy" which shows some of the the nonsense
uttered by Dr. Heine can be traced back to nonsense from Gary
Matsumoto. The Dick Destiny article ends with this:

The press, of course,
cannot evaluate independently, being only able to deliver arguments
from authority – all
depending on who it believes to be authority.

But, for every fact-based media article there appear to be about five
or six bullshit-based media articles.

Matsumoto reports that Dr. Heine "supervised the work of accused
anthrax killer Bruce E. Ivins" and Dr. Heine was "one of the few scientists at the Army lab
with the skills to grow large batches of anthrax" Science
magazine reported, "Heine said he had no experience making
anthrax stocks himself."

Who are we to believe?

Matsumoto reports that. "Heine told the 16-member panel that Ivins
would have had to grow as many as 10 trillion spores, an astronomical
amount that couldn't have gone unnoticed by his colleagues." And
it would have taken a year to grow 10 million spores. Dr. Ivins himself stated that he was growing nearly a trillion spores a week.
(FBI
pdf file #847423, page 5)

Who are we to believe?
April 23, 2010 (C) - This is really
getting interesting! I
just found a small article from Science Magazine's web site with the
great title "Ex-USAMRIID
Scientist Defends Bruce Ivins Using Back-of-the-Envelope Math."
It turns out that Dr. Heine has no
experience making spores. So, he was talking through his
hat when he said it would take a year to make the spores in the anthrax
letters. Science Magazine asked Adam Driks from Loyola
University, "who routinely makes anthrax stocks for research" how long
it would take to make the spores in the letters, and Dr. Driks replied,
"Making
10 to 15 liters of anthrax — which is approximately how much would have
been required — 'might have meant having to use many, many little
flasks (20 to 50 milliliters each) over a number of days.'"

The article ends with this:

Heine, who was himself a
suspect early on in the investigation—along with several other USAMRIID
researchers, told reporters that he had serious misgivings about how
the Federal Bureau of Investigation had handled the case. “I have a strong desire to clear
Bruce’s name,” he told reporters.

It appears that there is
a very good chance that facts will override uninformed opinions in the
NAS review.

April 23, 2010 (B) - There's a radio
interview with Dr. Henry Heine stating his beliefs about Ivins'
innocence HERE.

It's interesting that Dr. Heine considers those who testified against
Dr. Ivins to be "Judases."
That implies that he feels they should have stood by Dr. Ivins whether he was guilty or not.

Dr. Heine also shows his abysmal ignorance of the case by again
bringing up the
silicon issue. He still believes the silicon was part of some
"weaponization" process, which is totally absurd if you have seen the
data. He suggests that some foreign government was behind the
attacks because they have the capabilities to "weaponize" spores with
silicon.

Dr. Heine and the host of the radio show seem to suggest that the only
reason Dr. Hatfill said that he believes Ivins was the culprit is
because Dr. Hatfill doesn't want to become the focus of the
investigation again. That's about as good an example of
manipulating facts to fit a belief as we're likely to see.

But, the best example of totally misreading the facts comes at the very
end of the interview when Dr. Heine actually says that the FBI was
there watching
Ivins commit suicide. He bases that absurdity upon reports
he read. But those reports say that the FBI was watching the house, they saw the ambulance
arrive, and they went into the house AFTER the paramedics had
entered. They did NOT watch Dr. Ivins commit suicide.
Absurdities piled upon absurdities.

April 23, 2010 (A) - A few days ago,
I
was thinking that I was beginning to run out of things to write
about. But this morning there are two MORE new articles about the
anthrax case to comment upon. Both are about comments made by a
former colleague of Bruce Ivins after he met with the panel from the
National Academies of Science (NAS). The first article is by
Scott Shane of The New York Times and is titled "Colleague
Disputes Case Against Anthrax Suspect."

Asked by reporters after
his testimony whether he believed that there was any chance that Dr.
Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, had carried out the attacks, the
microbiologist, Henry S. Heine, replied, “Absolutely not.” At the Army’s
biodefense laboratory in Maryland, where Dr. Ivins and Dr. Heine
worked, he said, “among the senior scientists, no one believes it.”

According to Scott Shane,

The public remarks from Dr.
Heine, two months after the Justice Department officially closed the case, represent a major public challenge to its
conclusion in one of the largest, most politically delicate and
scientifically complex cases in F.B.I. history.

The opinion of a friend is "a
major public challenge"? Really? And Mr. Shane also says
this:

In its written summation of
the case in February, the bureau said Dr. Ivins’s lab technicians grew
anthrax spores that the technicians incorrectly believed were added to
Dr. Ivins’s main supply flask. But the summary said the spores were
never added to the flask, suggesting that surplus spores might have
been diverted by Dr. Ivins for the letters.

Wha...? That seems
to be Scott Shane's own bizarre interpretation of what's in the summary
report. I'll have to do some research to try to figure out what
he's talking about. I recall reading that newly produced spores
were sometimes added to flask RMR-1029 if the amount in the flask
seemed low, but I don't recall any suggestion that that had anything to do with how the attack
spores were made. Here is what Scott Shane says about when
the National Academies of Science will finish their review:

The panel is expected to complete its
report this fall.

The second article I
found on the Net this morning is titled "Co-Worker:
Ivins didn't do it," and it's from the Frederick News-Post. The
article begins with this paragraph:

It is absolutely impossible that Bruce
Ivins, accused of mailing anthrax and killing five people in 2001,
could have created and cleaned up anthrax spores in the timeline and
manner the FBI alleges, Ivins' former co-worker said Thursday.

Interestingly, Dr. Heine provides some data that other scientists can
try to dispute with better data:

Heine told the panel that the
most common way of growing bacteria at USAMRIID is in flasks. Based on
the number of envelopes mailed out (eight to 10), the concentration of
spores in the powder (10 to the 12th power spores per gram) and the
number of grams of anthrax per envelope (1 to 2 grams), he calculated
there were at least 10 to the 13th power anthrax spores in the attacks.
Under ideal conditions, growing anthrax in a flask could produce only
10 to the 11th power spores -- one hundredth of the total needed.

"At absolute best, if he
pushed it, he could have possibly done it in a year," Heine said of
Ivins, after the meeting.

Other experts have said
that the powders could have been created in a few days. I suspect
that Dr. Heine is talking about how things are done if you follow
strict lab procedures designed to meet very rigid testing
procedures. But, obviously, the anthrax culprit did NOT follow
strict lab procedures, since strict lab procedures do not allow for the
creating of lethal anthrax powders in secret.

The Frederick News-Post reports something different about when the NAS
will complete it's review:

The NAS committee left
after about half an hour of questioning Heine. Members already met
twice to review FBI documents, and they
expect a draft report to be ready by midsummer.

Here is more about what Dr. Heine believes:

After the committee left,
Heine expressed frustration that he had already told the FBI everything
he just presented, but that no one had listened to him. FBI agents he
dealt with were professional, he said, but some officials at the
Department of Justice were extremely arrogant.

He
said the whole investigation was
filled with lies. Officials told different USAMRIID researchers
their co-workers accused them of committing the attacks, just to see
their reaction. They searched his vacation house and car without
warrants.

They
misled him about the questions
they would ask him in front of a grand jury. And they tried to
get him to seek a restraining order against Ivins, only days before he
committed suicide, by saying Ivins had threatened to kill Heine during
a group therapy session.

Heine is not the only one who
does not believe Ivins was the real killer.

"At least among my closest
colleagues, nobody believes Bruce did this," he said. He thinks the FBI
went after Ivins because "personality-wise, he was the weakest link."

Friends of the accused
aren't generally considered to be impartial witnesses.

It appears that we may be having a "trial by media" going on
here. The defense is currently presenting its case. It's
all about opinions of friends
and colleagues and miscellaneous conspiracy theorists. No actual
facts. But there is some data which can be checked and proven or
disproven. The question is: Will the media allow a rebuttal
from the prosecution?

This could all get very interesting again.
April 22, 2010 - Hmm. This
morning, I see I have two new
articles to write about. Both
are opinion
pieces. The first is Glenn Greenwald's opinion from Salon.com
titled "Unlearned
lessons from the Steven Hatfill case." It begins with this:

Andrew Sullivan rightly
recommends this new
Atlantic article by David Freed, which details how the FBI and a
mindless, stenographic American media combined to destroy the life of
Steven Hatfill. Hatfill is the former U.S. Government
scientist who for years was publicly depicted as the anthrax attacker
and subjected to Government investigations so invasive and relentless
that they forced him into almost total seclusion, paralysis and mental
instability, only to have the Government years later (in
2008) acknowledge that he had nothing to do with those attacks and
to pay
him $5.8 million to settle the lawsuit he brought. There are
two crucial lessons that ought to be learned from this horrible --
though far-from-rare -- travesty:

(1)It requires an extreme level of
irrationality to read what happened to Hatfill and simultaneously to
have faith that the "real anthrax attacker" has now been identified
as a result of the FBI's wholly untested
and uninvestigated case against Bruce Ivins.
The parallels are so overwhelming as to be self-evident.

And Greenwald's "crucial
lesson" #2 is:

(2)More generally, it is hard to overstate
the authoritarian impulses necessary for someone -- even in the wake of
numerous cases like Steven Hatfill's -- to place blind faith in
government accusations without needing to see any evidence or have that
evidence subjected to adversarial scrutiny. Yet that is exactly
the blind faith that dominates so many of our political debates.

The "uninvestigated"
case against Ivins? Uninvestigated by whom? Glenn Greenwald?

I find the two sections below to be of particular interest and
representative of Greenwald's entire diatribe:

the American media --
with some notableexceptions
-- continued to do to Ivins what it did to Hatfill and what it does in
general: uncritically
disseminate government claims rather than questioning or investigating
them for accuracy. As a result, many Americans continue to
blindly assume any accusations that come from the Government must be
true.

The first section claims that countless people are expressing doubts
about the case against Ivins, and the second section claims that
everyone is simply taking what the government says as true and, with
few exceptions, no one is questioning anything.

The only parallels
in the Hatfill and Ivins "investigations"that are "so overwhelming as
to be self-evident" are that the opinion makers
in the media were wrong
about both. The opinion
"journalists" in the media pointed the finger at an innocent
man, Dr. Hatfill, and now they're defending a guilty man, Dr.
Ivins. The opinion makers
stand up for
and argue that that actual culprit - Dr. Ivins - is probably innocent because the media and people with angry
opinions like Glenn Greenwald don't
bother to look at the evidence.

The second new article this morning is from a UPI "Outside View"
commentator, Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D., a U.S. Army Reserve colonel who
knew Dr. Ivins at Ft. Detrick, "although not well." His uninformed opinion
is titled "Anthrax
Letters: Was Bruce Ivins hounded to death?"

He didn't strike me as
being dangerous and I was, therefore, both surprised and shocked that
the FBI concluded that he was the anthrax mailer.

The most striking elements in Colonel Sellin's comments are his near total ignorance about the case
and his reliance upon people who appear to be equally ignorant about the
case.

It has been reported that
Ivins underwent a similar degree of harassment [as Hatfill] and subjected to an equivalent amount
of leaking of confidential information as Hatfill, before the
case was officially closed in February 2010.

I've been tracking the case since Day One and I never saw any leaks
about Ivins in the media. When Ivins' name was first mentioned in
the Los Angeles Times a few days after his suicide, it seemed to be a
name out of the blue. I thought I'd never heard it before.
However, research showed that he was co-author of some articles I'd
read, and he was mentioned in the media when they reported the
unauthorized cleanups at Ft. Detrick. That was it.No leaks
whatsoever.

Colonel Sellin even argues the
silicon issue once again:

Apparently, equivalent
levels of silicon in the anthrax spore coats weren't found at Fort
Detrick. If true, then the
anthrax in the second mailing may not have come from there. Silicon
isn't required to grow anthrax but must be added. It isn't only
a common constituent of anti-foaming agents used during the
fermentation process in anthrax production but it can help make a
better anthrax aerosol to generate greater lethal effects.

There's also a hint that
Colonel Sellin still believes that
al Qaeda was probably behind the
attacks:

It is interesting to note
that the second more lethal anthrax letters were likely mailed between
Oct. 6 and Oct. 9, 2001. The coalition attack on Afghanistan began Oct.
7, 2001.

Could the phrase "We have this anthrax" have referred to the high
potency anthrax in the second mailing and meant, not only to instill
panic, but also as a mutually assured destruction-type threat to limit
or prevent effective action against Taliban and al-Qaida targets in
Afghanistan?

All that is needed to believe that al Qaeda was behind the anthrax
attacks is to be totally ignorant of
the facts.

What these two opinion pieces seem to show is that the people who are
abysmally ignorant of the evidence, but who have angry opinions anyway,
are making their voices heard in the media and on the Internet, while
those who actually know about the evidence have stated their findings
and have moved on to other things.

But, it's not a hopeless situtation. When enough ignorant people
make enough ignorant claims, someone usually decides it's time to set
the record straight. That may come after the NAS has finished
their review of the science of the case.
April 21, 2010 (B) - I just noticed
that Salon.com
has an article about the Hatfill interviews. I'll probably write
a comment about it tomorrow. Like so many others who don't
do research, they compare the Hatfill case to the Ivins case.

April 21, 2010 (A) - Although it
seems
hard to believe, people on the Lunatic Fringe are stillmaking
absurd claims about the silicon that was detected in the spore
coats of the attack anthrax.

For many years, a report from AFIP
(Armed Forces Institute of Pathology) that had not been publicly
released was used by conspiracy theorists to
make absurd claims that the unreleased AFIP report could prove that the attack
spores were coated with silica and utilized some supersophisticated
weaponization technique. The AFIP report would also prove that
the U.S. government was hiding that facts so no one could show that the
attack powders were made in
some secret and illegal U.S.
government lab. The analysis performed at
Sandia National Laboratories which showed the spores were NOT coated
simply caused the conspiracy theorists to
argue that Sandia must be part of the vast conspiracy.

The AFIP report was recently released in response to an FOIA request,
but whoever created the .pdf file created a file that is about 16 times
larger than it should be. The 41 pages measure 35.4
inches by 45.8 inches each,
instead of 8.5 inches by 11 inches.
That means the file is 26 million bytes when it should be less than 2
million bytes. And that means it is too big to be sent by email,
and it's even a problem to put it on a web site where people can
download to it.

If you manage to obtain a copy of the report, you will see that AFIP
made no claims about
weaponization. The report consists of many images and graphs and
a few paragraphs of explanation. The only conclusion drawn is
that there was no bentonite
in the powders (bentonite was a primary ingredient in weaponized
anthrax spores made in Iraq).

The claims made by the Lunatic Fringe were their own
absurd interpretations of the images and graphs, which is what they
continue to do. Silicon is only mentioned in two places in
the AFIP report. Page 32 of the pdf file has these two paragraphs:

Significant
findings
for the SPS02.57.03 sample [probably the Daschle powder] include the
presence of silicon and oxygen, which is indicative of silica (SiO2) or
silicates (SiO4, etc.). It
is not possible to distinguish between silica and silicates
(clays). Other components, which are not expected to be
significant to the question at hand were sulfur, phosphorus, sodium,
calcium, and chlorine. It is worthwhile to note that there was no
evidence of aluminum in the specimen.

The
SPS02.88.01 sample [probably
the NY Post powder] had
regions which
exhibited the same set of elements found in SPS02.57.03, but these
tended to be on "large" pieces within the sample. It appears that silicon (not bonded to
oxygen or other elements) is present in many areas of this sample.

The same information
is repeated on pages 33 and 34 with different phrasing for the second
paragraph:

The
SPS02.88.01 sample had regions which
exhibited the same set of elements found in SPS02.57.03, but these were
generally on the larger aggregates within the sample. Many
of the smaller pieces within the sample exhibited the main peak
associated with silicon with very
little oxygen as shown in the
attached data sheet.

The
image for SPS02.57.03 on page 2 shows a clump or pile of spores that
appears to be roughly 70 microns in length by 40 microns in
width. (A spore is 1 (ONE) micron in diameter.) Here is a
screen capture of the image and one of the graphs for the (presumed)
Daschle
powder with the Silicon peak identified in red:

As
you can see, the graph shows the presence of Silicon (Si) at the spot marked by the cross
near the center of the image. The report contains other
graphs for each of
the 4 crosses. But, because this is a bulk analysis, NOT an examination
of a single spore, the location and amount of silicon is not really
known. The
EDX is reading what is at that spot, which could include parts of
several spores or material between spores.

The image on page 3 of the report shows a clump that is about 40
microns by 40
microns. The
image on page 5 shows a clump that is about 25 microns by 35
microns. The image on page 6 is a clump roughly 20 microns by 20
microns.

Then on page 7 we have this image and graph of what appears to be a
chunk of material from the NY Post powder:

The graph shows a massive
peak for Silicon, but the bulk
analysis was done on a large chunk
that extends well beyond the 200 microns by 200 microns image.
Without
knowing more about what is located at the particular point being
examined, there's no way of knowing whether the reading represents
anything real. It seems even possible that the reading could be
from the background.
What material was the powder set upon? We don't
know.

To the untrained eye of a rabid conspiracy theorist, the reading says almost the entire
powder is silicon and the spores are barely detectable in the
silicon. That is absurd, of course. But the
conspiracy theorists are trying to argue that it means something sinister, even if they
have no clue to exactly what it means.

(A weaponization process used at Dugway Proving Grounds back in the
1950s and 1960s involved covering spores with a layer of siliCA so they wouldn't stick
together. Click HERE for a
picture of a single weaponized spore
coated with silica. A silica molecule consists of one Silicon
atom attached to two Oxygen atoms. The AFIP report specifically
states that there is very little oxygen in the readings, therefore the material being detected cannot be silica.
The AFIP graphs show nearly pure silicon. Plus, the material is
a very big clump, which says
there is no coating to prevent clumps.)

The AFIP report also contains images and graphs for samples
of materials that can be used for comparison, like pure sea sand and
chunks of bentonite, which showed
silicon readings very close to the above readings.

More information is needed. The idea that the New York Post
powder was actually pure silicon with a spore inserted here and there
is preposterous - except, evidently, to rabid conspiracy theorists and
True Believers. They're arguing that the CLUMP of spores was
coated in a supersophisticated way that prevents clumping. That
is logical to them.

The scientists I've asked about this report merely state that the
images are too fuzzy to be certain what they contain. You cannot
see the individual spores. And it's obvious
that the AFIP readings for the NY Post powder do NOT represent the
actual
elements in the NY Post powder. Rather than make guesses
about what the readings represent, they'd prefer to wait for an
explanation from AFIP - which we'll probably never get. Until
then, the analysis done at Sandia is the ONLY accurate analysis
available. That analysis shows silicon only inside the spore coats of some of the spores.

So, we have the AFIP report which shows that AFIP made no claims about
the powders, but conspiracy theorists did their own interpretations of
the data in order to come up with their screwball beliefs.

Situation normal. The Lunatic Fringe believes what they want to
believe. Reality is something else altogether.

April 19, 2010 (B) - The same unconfirmed
source who reported that Dr. Hatfill was
going to appear before The National Press Club in May is now
saying, "Dr. Hatfill’s
appearance at the National Press Club will not go forward in May as
planned."

Meanwhile, someone
else reminded me of the August 23, 2002 profile of Barbara Hatch
Rosenberg in Science Magazine, titled "Unconventional
Detective Bears Down on a Killer." The profile is very
admiring of
the way Dr. Rosenberg accused a person she didn't even know of mass murder, a person who later
turned out to be totally innocent.

April 19, 2010 (A)
- Foreign
Policy Magazine has a refresher course on the early days of the
anthrax mailings in an article which praises the work of the CDC's
Epidemic Intelligence Service.
April 18, 2010 - When I first
learned that Dr. Hatfill was going to be interviewed by Matt Lauer on
The Today Show and would also be the subject of an article in The
Atlantic
magazine at about the same time, my first thought was that Dr. Hatfill
had written a book about what happened to him after the anthrax
attacks.

But there was no mention of any book in either interview. The
unconfirmed report that Dr. Hatfill is also going to be talking to The
National Press Club in May also seemed to be part of some "media blitz"
for a book. But, now I'm looking for some other explanation for
Dr. Hatfill's sudden willingness to appear in public.

I suspect it could simply be that he's clearing the way for becoming an
"ordinary citizen" again. He's getting the media attention done
and over with. He's answering all questions, so he won't be
hounded for questions any longer. It seems he's trying to
make himself "old news" and not worthy of any further hounding by the
media.

The speech at the National Press Club - if it's going to be a speech -
could be interesting. It could be what I was hoping to see in the
book by Dr. Hatfill that hasn't yet materialized.

Yesterday, while looking for some confirmation of the May event, I
couldn't find anything about it. However, I
did find this worthwhile item from a few years ago on The National
Press Club's web site:

National
Press Club
Deplores Court Order To Compel Source's Identity

WASHINGTON -- The National
Press
Club joins other journalism organizations in expressing concern about a
decision to hold a newspaper reporter in contempt of court for failing
to disclose her news sources.

Former USA Today reporter
Toni Locy
is being held in contempt of court by U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton
for failing to reveal her sources for stories she wrote about the
federal government's investigation of former Army scientist Steven J.
Hatfill's potential connection to the 2001 anthrax attacks. Hatfill is
suing the government.

Locy will be fined $500 a day
for
seven days, $1,000 a day for the following seven days, and $5,000 a day
for the seven days after that.

"We believe it will have a
chilling
effect not only on those currently in our profession but also on
aspiring newspaper reporters such as those Locy teaches at West
Virginia University," said NPC President Sylvia Smith.

"If confidential news sources
fear
that reporters can be coerced into divulging their sources' names, then
news sources will start to dry up. That will reduce the flow of news
and ultimately weaken our democracy," she said.

"No one will ever agree with
everything newspapers print," Smith said. "But we encourage all those
involved in the case to recall the words of Thomas Jefferson: 'Were it
left to me to decide whether we should have a government without
newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a
moment to prefer the latter.'"

It could be interesting to hear
what Dr. Hatfill has to say to a group that felt he was wrong in trying to get Toni Locy to
reveal the names of the FBI/DOJ sources who where helping to ruin
Hatfill's
life with false information.

It would be interesting to hear what Dr. Hatfill has to say if we can
hear it without
any media
editing.

NBC and Matt Lauer evidently expected that they would have a blockbuster exclusive in getting
the first interview of Dr. Hatfill after so many years of
silence. Before the interview, I heard talk that the
interview would be shown again several times on MSNBC during the day,
and it
would be mentioned and summarized on the NBC Nightly News. But
none of that seems to have happened. There was nothing on the Nightly News about
the interview. And, if there was anything on TV on MSNBC about
it, it
escaped
my notice. Clearly, the interview wasn't what NBC and Matt
Lauer expected to get.

We don't know exactly what they got, since all we saw of the interview
were eight
minutes
of heavily edited ordinariness. And those eight minutes were
mostly narrative and questions. We probably saw less than four minutes
of Dr. Hatfill actually talking, and that was from an interview that
undoubtedly
took at least an hour, and
more likely closer to two hours. Except for talk shows where you
usually see everything, that's the way TV news interviews are
typically done.
They film or tape or digitally record questions and answers for hours and then chop, snip and edit
everything down to get what is actually shown on TV.

I suspect they wanted a haggard, frustrated, angry Dr. Hatfill lashing
out at the government for what was done to him. Instead, they got
a healthy, semi-content, mellow Dr. Hatfill who wasn't really upset
about
anything. The first question was about being given a lie detector
test. Was Dr. Hatfill upset at being asked to take such a
test? Dr.
Hatfill merely shook his head and told Matt Lauer it was standard stuff
and didn't bother him at all. According to Dr. Hatfill,
the questions asked by the FBI were "mundane," not aggressive or
accusatory. That part of the interview ran from the :45 minute
mark to the 1:25 mark. Then there was some narration and
clips.

At the 1:55 mark, the interview turned to the first search of Dr.
Hatfill's apartment on June 25, 2002. Hatfill described the
search as "a show" for the media. He was surprised. No
anger.
That part ended at the 2:50
minute mark.

At the 3:00 minute mark, Lauer asked Dr. Hatfill about what his life
was like for "the next several years." According to Dr. Hatfill,
his basic attitude during that time was that it was all going to end
some day. It was just something he had to put up with until
then. That part of the interview ended at the 3:40 mark.

At the 4:00 minute mark Lauer talked about Hatfill losing his job and
being under constant surveillance. Dr. Hatfill seemed to simply
accept it. He said, "The law says they can do that, so ....
fine." Hatfill did show some anger at having the FBI contact his
friends and warn them about associating with him. The attempts to
"isolate" him from his friends were clearly very painful to him. That
part of
the interview ended at the 4:55 mark.

At the 5:15 mark, Lauer started asking Dr. Hatfill about Bruce
Ivins. Lauer started by asking, "Given what you've told me,
Steve, about your complete lack of confidence in the Justice Department
and the investigation they conducted surrounding you, do you think they
got it right now?"

Wow! What a loaded question! And, clearly, the answer Dr.
Hatfill gave was NOT what Lauer wanted. Dr. Hatfill merely shook
his
head and said he had no way of knowing. He hasn't seen the
data. The FBI hasn't found it necesssary to share any of their
investigation material regarding Ivins with him. Then Hatfill
said, "I have talked with some senior scientists whom I respect, and I
have to take their opinion that ... yeah. Other than that, I
can't say." To be clear, Lauer
asked, "Do you think they got it right now?" and Hatfill responded,
"Yeah." (In the interview in The Atlantic,
Dr. Hatfill says he originally thought that al Qaeda was behind the
attacks and
was surprised when the FBI indentified a fellow scientist from USAMRIID
as the culprit.)

The Lauer interview then explored the fact that Dr. Hatfill was only
able to
get
through the terrible ordeal because he had a "band of brothers" who
stood by
him. That part of the Lauer interview ended at the 7:35
minute mark.

In that final part of the interview, it is clear that Hatfill was
distraught over the FBI's harassment and the fact that the FBI was able
to do what they did without his being able to stop it. It wasn't
what he expected from his government. The interview ended on that
note, which is undoubtedly what NBC and Lauer felt was the "best"
ending they could get.

How could any competent journalist have NOT asked: When and how did you first
learn that you were being suspected of being the anthrax mailer?

If Matt Lauer asked that question, they didn't show it. Up until
the Lauer interview, NBC's record regarding reporting on the Amerithrax
investigation was better than average. Now they are just average
or lower than average.

To someone familiar with the facts of the case, the Lauer interview was
like only being shown the last third of a thriller movie. You get
there when the crisis is already in full swing. You're not shown
all the parts that led up to the crisis.

Who made Dr. Steven Hatfill a
suspect? It was NOT the
FBI.

How can anyone understand what happened to Dr. Hatfill if nothing is
mentioned about how he became suspect???!!!

How can anyone understand what happened to Dr. Hatfill if you begin
with the search of his apartment??!!

How can anyone understand what happened to Dr. Hatfill if there's no
explanation of how he was picked from all the thousands of people who
should have been even more likely suspects??!!

All you hear about the Bruce Ivins case from doubters is how there were
hundreds of other
scientists who theoretically
could have taken the seed spores from flask RMR-1029 besides the man
who was actually in control of the flask.

But almost no one in the media seems interested in how Dr. Hatfill
became a
suspect.

No doubt that is because that is a story which shows the media in a bad
light. Media reporting was abysmal.
It was the most blantant
example of
media bias and poor reporting America has seen in the past hundred years or more.

The
Lauer interview was just a continuation of the irresponsibly bad reporting about the Amerithrax
investigation that we've seen for over eight years.

The article in The
Atlantic magazine was excellent, but even there the reporter
distorted a few facts in an attempt to suggest that the Ivins
investigation somehow compares to what happened to Dr. Hatfill. It doesn't
compare!

Conspiracy theorists and the
media identified Dr. Hatfill as a suspect. They even
claimed that the FBI was covering
up for Dr. Hatfill because the FBI was NOT investigating him
publicly.

The FBI's investigation identified Bruce Ivins as the anthrax mailer.

The FBI got it right.
The media and the conspiracy theorists got it totally wrong.

The Matt Lauer interview seems to be very
heavily edited. If my experiences with being interviewed by the
media are any gauge,
Dr. Hatfill was probably interviewed for about two hours in order to
get
the 8 minutes actually used on TV. And the bits they used on TV
were probably carefully chosen to fit to the agenda of the show, which
may
not really be representative of what Hatfill actually said or wanted to
say. The show is about the harassment of Dr. Hatfill. It's
not about what caused him to become a "person of interest."

There is only one sentence in
the entire 8 minute Lauer interview about what happened in the eight
months prior to the June 25, 2002 search of Hatfill's apartment.
They mention that a lot of people were being investigated. Then,
at around the 1:20 minute mark, the narrator says, "But, unlike the
others, he
[Hatfill] became the focus of the investigation after two outside sources said he fit
the profile of the anthrax killer."

That's it! Wow! What a disappointment!

The MSNBC article is about the same, except they don't even bother to
get the facts right. They say:

Ivins committed suicide after his name was made public.

That is not true, of
course. Ivins committed suicide on July 27, 2008, and then, days after
his suicide, on August 1, his name was first made public in an
article by David Willman in The Los Angeles Times. There was
absolutely nothing about the
case against Dr. Bruce Ivins in the news prior to his death.
MSNBC merely distorted or ignored the facts in order to promote the
agenda of the article.

The rest of the MSNBC article implies that the investigation of Steven
Hatfill began
in June of 2002 with the first search of his apartment. There is
absolutely no mention of all the media attention paid to Hatfill during
the eight
months prior to that search, nor is there any mention of Barbara Hatch Rosenberg and her role in
pointing the finger at Dr. Hatfill.

Ah! The interview in The Atlantic is a lot better. Shortly after the
article begins, it starts
describing Don Foster's efforts to identify Dr. Hatfill as the anthrax
mailer.

Surveying the publicly
available evidence, as well as documents sent to him by the FBI, Foster surmised that the killer was an
American posing as an Islamic jihadist. Only a limited number of
American scientists would have had a working knowledge of anthrax. One of those scientists, Foster
concluded, was a man named Steven Hatfill, a medical doctor who
had once worked at the Army’s elite Medical Research Institute of
Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), which had stocks of anthrax.
....

Don
Foster, the Vassar professor, was among those who set the wheels of
injustice in motion.
....

The deeper Foster dug,
the more Hatfill looked to him like a viable suspect.
....

In February 2002,
Foster tried to interest the FBI in Hatfill, but says he was told that Hatfill had a good alibi. “A
month later, when I pressed the issue,” Foster wrote, “I was told,
‘Look, Don, maybe you’re spending too much time on this.’”
....

And then Barbara Hatch Rosenberg becomes part of the article:

Meanwhile, Barbara Hatch
Rosenberg, a passionate crusader against the use of bioweapons, was
also convinced that an American scientist was to blame for the anthrax
attacks. In an interview with the BBC in early 2002, she theorized that
the murders were the result of a top-secret CIA project gone awry, and
that the FBI was hesitant to arrest the killer because it would
embarrass Washington. A molecular biologist and professor of
environmental science who had once served as a low-level bioweapons
adviser to President Clinton, Rosenberg
had taken it upon herself to look into the anthrax murders, and her
investigations had independently led her to Hatfill.
....

Foster says he met
Rosenberg over lunch in April 2002, “compared notes,” and “found that
our evidence had led us in the same direction.”
Weeks dragged on while he and Rosenberg tried to interest the FBI in
their theories, but the bureau
remained “stubbornly unwilling to listen.”Two months later,
her “patience exhausted,” Rosenberg, according to Foster, met on
Capitol Hill with Senate staff members “and laid out the evidence, such
as it was, hers and mine.” Special Agent Van Harp, the senior
FBI agent on what by then had been dubbed the “Amerithrax”
investigation, was summoned to the meeting, along with other FBI
officials.

Rosenberg criticized
the FBI for not being aggressive enough.

Exactly a week after
the Rosenberg meeting, the FBI carried out its first search of
Hatfill’s apartment, with television news cameras broadcasting it live.

More than half way through the article, it describes the columns
written by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. It clearly
shows how inaccurate and mindlessly
stupid
those
articles were.

Hatfill would later sue The
New York Times for that and a host of other alleged libels. The
case would eventually be dismissed, after a judge ruled that Hatfill
was a public figure. To successfully sue for defamation, public figures
must prove that a publication acted with “actual malice.”

There's also a mention of Dr. Hatfill's lawsuit against Vanity Fair and
Readers' Digest over the Don Foster article:

In addition to suing the
Justice Department for violating his privacy and The New York Times
for defaming him, Hatfill also brought a libel lawsuit against Don
Foster, Vanity Fair, and Reader’s Digest, which had
reprinted Foster’s article. The lawsuit led to a settlement whose dollar amount all
parties have agreed to keep confidential.

That settlement amount was almost certainly in the millions, since Dr.
Hatfill now seems to be spending a lot of his own money on projects
seemingly intended to fulfill Dr. Hatfill's dreams while also helping
people in undeveloped
countries.

Hatfill has committed $1.5
million to building his floating genetic laboratory, a
futuristic-looking vessel replete with a helicopter, an operating room
to treat rural indigenous peoples, and a Cordon Bleu–trained chef.
Hatfill intends to assemble a scientific team and cruise the Amazon for
undiscovered or little-known plants and animals. From these organisms,
he hopes to develop new medications for leukemia, and for tuberculosis
and other diseases that have been growing increasingly resistant to
existing antibiotics. Any useful treatments, he says, will be licensed
to pharmaceutical companies on the condition that developing nations
receive them at cost. Hatfill hopes to christen the boat within two
years.

In the Atlantic article, there is lot of information about Dr. Hatfill
that I've never seen anywhere before. You can read the article to
get all the
details. But, I will mention one tidbit:

Though Hatfill’s apartment in
Frederick was less than a quarter mile from Ivins’s modest home on
Military Road, and both men worked at Fort Detrick at the same time,
Hatfill says the two never met.
Hatfill was surprised when the FBI ultimately pinned the anthrax
murders on a fellow American scientist.

“I thought it would
eventually be proven that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks,” he says.

I knew that Dr. Hatfill
thought that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks, but I didn't know that he
and Ivins had never met.

In the Matt Lauer interview, Lauer seemed to be trying to get Hatfill
to say he doesn't think that Ivins was the culprit, but Hatfill says
just the opposite. Dr. Hatfill says that experts he knows have
concluded that Ivins did it, and Hatfill has no information to dispute
what those experts believe.

The only serious flaws I see in The Atlantic's article are two comments
which show the opinions of the writer
of the article and have nothing to do with what Dr. Hatfill said.
First, there is this
sentence from near the beginning of the article:

[Hatfill's] story provides
a cautionary tale about how federal authorities, fueled by the general
panic over terrorism, embraced conjecture and coincidence as evidence,
and blindly
pursued one suspect while the real anthrax killer roamed free for more
than six years.

And then there is this from around the middle of the article:

The FBI’s sleuthing had
produced zero witnesses, no firm evidence, nothing to show that Hatfill
had ever touched anthrax, let alone killed anyone with it. So thin was
the bureau’s case that Hatfill was never even indicted. But that didn’t stop the FBI from
focusing on him to the virtual
exclusion of other suspects.

That is conclusively and demonstrably false.
The fact that the
public and the media didn't know about the investigation of Dr. Ivins
doesn't mean it wasn't happening. To imply that it did mean it wasn't happening is the
same logic
used by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg and other conspiracy theorists: If it
isn't being done in public, then it isn't being done at all.

When looking at all the facts, it becomes very clear that the
harassment of Dr. Hatfill was a separate matter handled by a different
group of FBI agents. While some members of that group may have
thought that the respected people pointing the finger at Dr. Hatfill
couldn't all be wrong, it
was also clear that there was never any real case against Dr.
Hatfill. The clumsy mistake when Attorney General Ashcroft called
Hatfill a "person of interest" was an attempt to show that he was not a
suspect, but the media didn't take it that way. They interpreted
things the way they wanted them interpreted.

The facts say that the Amerithrax case was very complicated and solid evidence
was extremely difficult to obtain. The Hatfill matter was a
side show that allowed the media to tear Hatfill's life apart.
The real case wasn't as interesting to the media. It was
boring. It is still
boring to them. They still want
to twist and distort it to make news that is easier to summarize in a
headline in order to grab the public's attention.

Dr.
Hatfill went through Hell for years, but The
Atlantic indicates
that all the money Hatfill got from the lawsuits is now allowing him to
lead the life of his dreams.

Good for him.

On the other hand, the
MSNBC article and
Matt Lauer's interview leave you with the impression
that Hatfill is still living in misery, only supported by a few
friends. CRAP!

April 15, 2010 (B)
- Someone has
just advised me that Dr. Hatfill's interview with Matt Lauer is taking
place today and will be on The Today Show tomorrow morning. It will
probably also be on MSNBC at various times during the day. And I
wouldn't be a bit surprised if it wasn't also mentioned prominently on
the NBC Evening News with Brian Williams.

Obviously, it's a coordinated appearance with the article in The
Atlantic which should also appear online tomorrow.

April
15, 2010 (A)
- The word for today
is "proffer."

One of my legal dictionaries says it means "to offer evidence in a
trial."

A proffer agreement is a
legal
agreement made between an
individual under criminal investigation and a prosecutor. It is
reached in a proffer session attended by the individual, his attorney,
the prosecutor and a case agent.

The basic idea is:

Such agreements are used in federal criminal cases.
They
permit individuals under scrutiny to offer evidence against other
criminals as a bargaining chip in their own possible criminal case.

The benefits are:

Prosecutors benefit from a
proffer agreement as much as a suspect can benefit. Through the
session, prosecutors are able to gain new leads in the criminal
investigation and further insight into the person involved in the
proffer.

The risks are:

If an immunity agreement or plea
bargain is not reached as the
result of a proffer session, the person
involved may be indicted. If this happens, the chances of presenting a believable
defense are impaired.

So,
if you're going to "make a proffer," you'd better be very certain that
the proffer will be accepted. If it isn't accepted, then you
could
have done serious harm to your own case.

Why are proffers so risky,
since
your words are not supposed to be used against you at a subsequent
trial? To begin with, unlike immunity or plea agreements, proffer
agreements do not prevent the government from making derivative use of your
statements. In other words, although the government cannot use your
actual proffer session statements against you in its case-in-chief, it
can use the information that you provide to follow up leads and conduct
further investigations. If those leads and further
investigations
capture new evidence, such evidence can be used to indict and convict
you. Even if the prosecutor is not able to develop new information from
your proffer, he will gain a tactical advantage from seeing (at the
proffer session) how you fare under the pressure of tough questioning,
how you present yourself as a witness and, most importantly, what your
theory of the case is. This will better prepare him to build his
evidence against you and to cross-examine you at trial, should you
choose to testify, and will thus boost his self-confidence. Moreover, if, like many suspects, you
implicate yourself in criminal activity during the proffer session, the
prosecutor will feel better about prosecuting you, because he will
"know" in his heart of hearts that you are guilty. (If the AUSA
believes that you lied during your proffer session, he can indict you
under Section 1001 of the federal criminal code for false statements to
the government. As a practical matter, this is almost never
done.)

But there are even
bigger risks in proffering. Virtually all proffer agreements
allow the government to use your statements against you for impeachment
purposes if you take the stand in a subsequent proceeding and testify
inconsistently with your proffer. And the version of the proffer that
will be compared to your trial testimony, in order to see whether you
should be impeached, is the version that was interpreted and written
down by government agents. More ominously, in recent years many government-drafted
proffer agreements allow use of your statements against you if any part
of your defense, including questions your lawyer asks of government
witnesses on cross-examination, is inconsistent with your proffer. These
broadly worded agreements, which have been consistently upheld at the
federal circuit court level, may effectively deny you the right to
present a defense at trial if your anticipated post-proffer immunity or
plea deal does not come through. Why? Because if any part of your defense is
deemed to be inconsistent with your proffer, and if that proffer
implicates you in any way, the entire proffer will be admitted against
you at trial. Thus, your attorney may find herself in the unenviable
position of failing to contest key portions of the government's case,
declining to cross-examine certain witnesses and choosing not to put
you on the stand, all in an effort to prevent your damaging proffer
statements from coming before the jury. Proposed proffer
agreements submitted to you for your and your attorney's signatures
should be examined with great care.

Given the risk involved, why would you even want to make
a
proffer if you have criminal exposure? For one reason and one reason
only: if you are facing imminent
prosecution and need an immunity agreement or plea bargain deal, you
usually cannot get either, particularly in white collar cases, without
first making a proffer.

So, if you try to make a plea deal and the
Justice Department attorney doesn't accept the deal, then the details
of your offer can be used to find more evidence against you. Your statements cannot be
used against you, but your statements may
lead investigators to
something that can be used
against you. If you do not
try to make a deal with the
prosecution, the prosecution will very likely try to get the maximum
penalty for the crime. In the Amerithrax case, the maximum
penalty would be the death penalty.

The word came up while I was reading an FBI account of a June 5, 2008
interview with someone who had just attended a meeting
where Bruce Ivins was also present. I think it may have
been an
Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, since a lot about Ivins' alcoholism is
mentioned, as is AA. (Psychiatric therapy sessions are not meetings.) The report is on
pages 66 through
69 of FBI
pdf file #847551. Here's the paragraph from page 68 that
contains the word "proffer":

IVINS told
[someone] that his attorney told him that
with his dealings with the FBI, sometimes IVINS plays a puppy that
wants to
appease, and sometimes he plays junior-detective.IVINS
has spent over $100 thousand dollars
from his retirement fund, on his attorney.The next time IVINS has
to
testify, he will have to have a proffer.According
to IVINS, the JAG on post wont allow anyone
to talk to his
attorneys.

So, on June 5, 2008, Bruce Ivins was in a position where he had to
either try to make a deal of some kind (i.e., proffer) with the
prosecuting attorney, or Ivins was going to be indicted.

Ivins and his attorney evidently didn't try to make any kind of deal,
because a few
weeks later, on or around June 25, his attorney advised him that he was
about to be indicted and would likely face the death penalty.
Then, a couple weeks after that, on July 9, Ivins tells his group
therapy
session that he's going to kill his co-workers and go out in a "blaze
of glory" rather than face the death penalty.

April 14, 2010 -
Someone just sent
me a
link which indicates that The Atlantic magazine interview with Dr.
Steven Hatfill will be in their May issue, and it will also be on-line
on Friday, April 16, the day after tomorrow. Here's the
description of the interview:

The Wrong Man

In the fall of
2001, a nation reeling from the horror of 9/11 was rocked by a series
of deadly anthrax attacks. As the pressure to find a culprit mounted,
the FBI, abetted by the media,
found one. The wrong one. This is the story of how federal authorities
blew the biggest anti-terror investigation of the past decade—and
nearly destroyed an innocent man. Here, for the first time, the falsely
accused, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, speaks out about his ordeal.

By David Freed

This story will be
online Friday, April 16.

The phrase "abetted by
the media" gives me hope that the interview will also be about events
that took place during the eight
monthsbefore the FBI
publicly searched Dr. Hatfill's apartment on June 25, 2002. April
13, 2010 -
While reading through the 2,728 pages of
supplementary documents
made available by the FBI and DOJ after the closing of the Amerithrax
case on February 19, 2010, I noticed an interesting interview with a
scientist who appears to work for the CDC in Atlanta. He
appears to
be the CDC scientist to whom Bruce Ivins sent the
October 4, 2010,
email. In that email, Ivins seemed to be desperately looking
for some other possible explanation than that Bob Stevens was dying
as a result of
the anthrax letter Ivins sent to Florida. Here is part of that
email:

From: Ivins, Bruce E Dr
USAMRIID
To:
Subject: Florida case(?)
Date: Thursday, October 04, 2001 9:57:19 PM
Hi,I just heard this
evening (and read over internet news) that a case of pulmonary anthrax
mayhave been identified
in Florida. Is this true, or is this just hysteria? The only Florida
strain of B.anthracis that I am
familiar with is V770, which is the parent of V770-NP1-R, the strain
used inproduction of the
human anthrax vaccine. (I believe that V770 was originally isolated
from a cow inFlorida in the early
1950s.) The article said that this person was an “Outdoorsman,”
and had drunk
water from a creek in North Carolina. If he really does have anthrax,
could he have gotten it this way,
or did he get it by tromping around some dusty field area. (Has North
Carolina been dry this summer?)
I know that in the wild in Africa, animals are supposed to be able to
get it from water holes by stirring
up spores and presumably ingesting and possibly inhaling them as an
aerosol. Could this have
happened? What if an animal had died upstream and the stream was
contaminated? (Drinking from a
stream or creek without boiling or purifying the water first is an
invitation to intestinal disease or
parasites, but have any other human anthrax cases been documented from
people drinking
contaminated water?)

Page 128 of FBI
pdf file #847572 contains this description of the early days of the
anthrax
attacks (with my interpretations of what was redacted in the FBI
report):

Around this time period, [the CDC scientist] recalled receiving an
e-mail from BRUCE IVINS regarding STEVENS having been diagnosed with
inhalation anthrax. When asked if [he] knew the date he received
the
email, [the scientist] stated [he] would have received it the Thursday
just before Columbus Day weekend (October 4, 20010. [The
scientist]
stated [he] was certain [he] received the e-mail on this date because
[he] would not have been at work checking [his] e-mail on Saturday or
Sunday of a holiday weekend. [The
scientist] who typically did not respond to IVINS via e-mail,
telephoned IVINS on October 5, 2001. IVINS ...

Then there's a big section that is redacted. The report continues
with this:

Looking back on that conversation, [the scientist] opined that IVINS was upset because there was very
little information in the media regarding this case.
At this time, [the scientist] recalled, there was nothing in the media
about the other cases. The cutaneous cases of anthrax had been
missed. Also, ERNESTO BLANCO, the other employee at American
Media
Incorporated (AMI), was not immediately diagnosed as having
anthrax.
[The scientist] opined that IVINS, having put all his effort into the
first mailings, would have been frustrated that it was all for
nothing. [The scientist] felt this would explain the difference
in
overall quality of the powders used in the two mailings. [The
scientist] recalled that the spores recovered from the letters used in
the first set of mailings were described as "granular and
multi-colored." The spores used in the second set of mailings
were
finer and more uniform in color. Due to the fact that the first
set of
mailings did not achieve his desired effect, IVINS may have put more
effort into producing the powder used in the second set of letters.

The CDC scientist goes into a lot of other details about Ivins'
scientific abilities, Ivins' intelligence and Ivins' actions in
attempting to clean up areas at
USAMRIID which Ivins' had evidently contaminated when preparing the
letters. On page 132, the scientist also makes a guess as to
Ivins'
motive:

Near the end of the interview, [the scientist] began to provide
opinions regarding Bioport, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and
the anthrax vaccine. [The scientist] did not believe this was
IVINS'
motive for the anthrax mailings. According to [the scientist,]
Bioport
had "Good Practice Standards" (GPS). Bioport would have initially
had
problems getting approval of its anthrax vaccine from the FDA, but this
was simply a 'hurdle." Bioport would have been going back
online
producing the vaccine; therefore, there would not have been a lack of
funding for vaccine research. [The scientist] opined that IVINS
was
more like an arsonist. An arsonist likes to set fires and then
"stick
around" to watch them burn. [The scientist] believed this was
most
likely the motive behind the mailings.

I suppose this could be added to the list of possible motives Ivins had
for doing what he did. My opinion, however, remains that the
letters
had more to do with concerns about a 9/11 followup attack from Muslim
terrorists rather than any
"arsonist" motive. After all, it's clear that
when the
first mailing didn't accomplish the anthrax mailer's objective, he put
together a second mailing
that would hit the warnings home a lot harder and more
thoroughly. A
person with the "arsonist" motive would typically just repeat the same
incendiary actions over
again until he got what he needed from it. (Immediately following
the anthrax mailings of 2001, there were hundreds if not thousands of hoax anthrax mailings
by people with the "arsonist" motive.)

The CDC scientist also offers a valuable opinion about several methods
that Ivins could have used to dry the attack spores. One of the
methods involves the use of chemicals. The CDC scientist suggests
that
Ivins could have learned that method from researchers at the Dugway
Proving Grounds who use the method, and with whom Ivins worked
closely. If Ivins didn't learn it there, he could have learned it
by
doing research on the Internet.

I'm tempted to put together another supplemental page with the title
"Bruce Ivins and The Murder of Bob Stevens." The FBI report on
the
interview of the CDC scientist confirms that on October 4 and 5 of 2001
Ivins had at least some inkling
that Bob Stevens may
have been infected as a result of the anthrax-laced letter Ivins mailed
to the
National Enquirer on September 17 or 18. Yet, knowing that he may have killed someone, Ivins
still went ahead and mailed the second
batch of letters containing an even more
lethal form of anthrax powder sometime within the next few days.

All the facts say that Ivins took care to make certain that the his
anthrax letters did NOT kill anyone. He put a warning in the
media
letters ("TAKE PENACILIN NOW") and a more explicit warning in the
senate letters ("WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX. YOU DIE NOW.") Plus
he taped up the
backs of
the envelopes, he used the pharmaceutical fold to wrap the powders,
etc. Yet, the fact that he may have unintentionally killed Bob
Stevens
didn't stop him from proceeding with the second mailing. That was
stupid and criminally irresponsible.

Perhaps he somehow managed to convince himself that the Stevens case
was just a coincidence. People in authority were saying Stevens' anthrax case could have resulted from something
Stevens encountered while vacationing in North Carolina. No
one was saying anything about
receiving any anthrax letters. And it had been over two weeks since Ivins had mailed
those first five letters.

Plus, Ivins may have figured that even if he had been responsible for
the death of Bob Stevens on October 5, it was too late to do anything
about
that.
And, worst of all, instead of alerting America to the danger of a
bioweapons attack from Muslim terrorists, as Ivins had wanted from his
efforts, the authorities and the media were trying to tell people to remain calm while at the same time
suggesting that the Stevens case could be from natural causes!

As the old sayings go: In for a penny, in for a pound. They can
only hang you once.

Ivins probably figured the Stevens case was an isolated instance - a
fluke - that could not be repeated now that there was an anthrax death
in the
news. Any warning letter mentioning anthrax and containing a
powder would
now
be taken very
seriously. The risk of more people being harmed or killed
was probably viewed by Ivins as being very small.

The FBI figures the second batch of letters went into the mail some
time between 3:30
p.m on
Saturday, October 6 and 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday, October 9, 2001, the day
after Columbus Day. Then ...
On October 12, Tom Brokaw's assistant is diagnosed as having cutaneous
anthrax.

On October 12, the media reports that Stephanie Dailey at AMI has
tested positive for anthrax exposure.

On October 15, the Daschle anthrax letter is opened.

On October 15, the 7-month-old
son
of an ABC freelance producer is diagnosed with cutaneous anthrax

On October 15, Ernesto Blanco at AMI is confirmed to have inhalation
anthrax.On
October 16, one of Bruce Ivins'
co-workers wrote to former co-worker in an e-mail,
"Bruce has been an absolute manic basket case the last few days."
Another old saying: The road to Hell is paved with good
intentions.
April 11, 2010 - If Dr. Bruce Ivins
had been put on trial for the murders of five people, the prosecuting
attorney would undoubtedly have included as part of the case against
Ivins the evidence showing consciousness
of guilt.

A guilty person knows he's guilty. And he because he knows he
committed the crime, he knows details about the crime that
investigators may not yet have learned. If the guilty person
doesn't immediately confess but, instead, tries to escape justice by
using lies, trickery or other means to mislead the investigation and
the investigators, proof of such actions are evidence of consciousness of guilt.
Examples:

1. Guilty
people
often run from the law. They try to escape justice by heading to
another country or city.

2. Guilty people often make false statements. They lie to
prevent the police from learning the truth.

3. Guilty people may tamper with evidence. They may try to
destroy or hide evidence.

4. Guilty people may try to intimidate, coerce or even kill
witnesses
who can testify against them.

By itself, evidence of "consciousness of guilt" is not enough to convict a
person. Example: Running from the law isn't proof of guilt, it's just an indicator of guilt. It's a
piece of circumstantial evidence, and like all circumstantial evidence
it's based upon the principle that a single piece of such evidence may
be explainable, but a pattern of repeated lies, trickery or deceit can
help prove guilt beyond any reasonable doubt. A jury just has to
evaluate all the pieces together.
Evidence of Dr. Ivins' consciousness of guilt are as follows:

1. In December of 2001, Ivins tried to destroy evidence by
cleaning areas at Ft. Detrick where he had prepared the anthrax letters
before mailing. Authorization is required before such
cleaning. He didn't get authorization.

2. In February of 2002, Ivins tried to tamper with evidence by
submitting to the FBI repository samples from flask RMR-1029 that were
improperly prepared and which, therefore, would not be usable in
court.
Ivins had 35 years of
experience in preparing slants, yet this time he prepared them
incorrectly.

3. In April of 2002, Ivins again
tried to destroy evidence by cleaning areas of Ft. Detrick where he had
prepared the anthrax letters before mailing. Authorization is required before such
cleaning. He didn't get authorization.
4. In April of 2002 Ivins also tried to mislead the investigation
by falsifying evidence when he submitted doctored or invalid samples
that were supposed to be from flask RMR-1029.

5. When questioned about the unauthorized cleanups at Ft.
Detrick, Ivins gave explanations that were contradictory to what he
actually did. In other words, he lied.

6. In 2008, when Dr. Ivins learned that a grand jury was about to
indicted him for the 5 murders, he told people he was going to kill the co-workers who may be
witnesses against him.

7. When put into a mental hospital because of his threats of
killing his co-workers and going out in a "blaze of glory," he called a
witness three times and left
angry, menacing messages on her voice mail.

8. While in the mental hospital, Ivins evidently tried to build a
case for an insanity plea by trying to convince a psychiatrist that he
couldn't remember taking the
actions that killed five people.

9. While claiming that he couldn't remember the actions that killed
five people, Ivins also claimed that he was not a person who would deliberately commit murder,
indicating that murder had not
been his intent and that he
was lying about not being able to remember. (Other evidence
indicates he had intended
to save lives by sending out
the anthrax-laced warning letters, not to take lives. But, the
road to Hell is paved with good intentions. It was
still a stupid and criminally irresponsible thing to
do.)

10. On July 27, 2008, rather than trying to prove his innocence
by fighting the case in court, Dr. Ivins escaped justice by taking his
own life.

I've commented upon some of this before. But it's important
enough
to repeat and to rework and re-phrase to make it more clear. I'm
also putting it
all on a new supplemental page titled "Bruce
Ivins' Consciousness of Guilt" so that it won't just drop out of
memory and out of sight.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, April 4,
2010, thru Saturday, April 10, 2010April
9, 2010 - At
the web site for a radio station which calls itself "No Lies Radio" you
can find a bizarre rant by lawyer/conspiracy theorist Barry Kissin in
which Mr. Kissin begins describing his beliefs this way:

"The
truth would be better served if we substituted for this dismissive
phrase 'conspiracy theory' the phrase 'lone nut theorist.' I
mean,
we're supposed to believe that Jack Kennedy was assassinated by a lone
nut. We're supposed to believe that MLK was assassinated by a
lone
nut. We're supposed to believe that Robert F. Kennedy was
assassinated
by a lone nut. And we're supposed to believe that the anthrax
attacks
were committed by a lone nut. And it's pure unadulterated
misinformation. And that's very easy to see in the case of
the
anthrax attacks."

To listen to the broadcast, you have to turn off the
radio ON-OFF switch on the right and click on the play button that
follows the words "This
show was broadcast March 29, 2010. It is now archived here — Use Player."
As
you can see from the quote, to agree with Mr. Kissin you merely have to
assume that "the government" is lying - all administrations, all
parties, all politicians for at least 60 years - except possibly
Representative Rush Holt who
is calling for an investigation into the anthrax attacks of 2001.
And, evidently, even Rush Holt is misguided, since Rep. Holt seemingly
believes foreigners were behind the attacks, while Kissin believes it
was a U.S. government conspiracy. Accompanying Kissin's verbal
radio rant is
a written rant that can be found by clicking HERE.
I can summarize the text this way: the wildly inaccurate news stories
from
the first days after the anthrax attacks are correct, while everything
we've learned since then is wrong and part of the coverup of an illegal
U.S. government bioweapons program that has been going on since 1969
under all administrations, with everyone in the government
participating.

April
6, 2010
- I probably should have made a bigger point in my Sunday comment about
how it appears that Bruce Ivins' unauthorized swabbing and
cleaning of
USAMRIID lab areas in April of 2002 may have been triggered by
receiving a subpoena requiring him to provide new samples from flask
RMR-1029 to replace the improperly prepared samples he had submitted to
the FBIR in February.

Using the 49 pages of notes I developed during the reading of the 2,728
pages of supplemental materials, plus other materials accumulated over
the years, I've been putting together a timeline chart for Bruce Ivins'
activities. Knowing what else was going on when Ivins
performed
certain actions can help determine his likely motivations for those
actions.

The April 2002 unauthorized swabbing and cleaning is an excellent
example. As the FBI reports show, Ivins' actions were basically
contradictory to his explanations for those actions. In other
words, he was lying.
So, what was the real reason
for the unauthorized swabbing and cleaning?

The FBI supplemental documents say Ivins did his
swabbing and cleaning on Monday and Tuesday, April 15 and 16,
2002.
However, I haven't yet been able to get an exact fix on the date he
received the subpoena to provide new samples from flask
RMR-1029. There
seem to be dozens of documents which merely say it was in April of
2002. Was it the the week before the cleanings? I'd
bet money on it, but I
can't
prove it - so far.

There were two highly suspicious actions by Ivins in April of 2002: (1)
Ivins prepared the false samples
clearly
intended to mislead the FBI. (2) Ivins did the
unauthorized cleanups. But which came first?
The exact dates are probably around somewhere. Taking 49 pages of
notes from 2,728 pages of documents means a lot of information was
thought not worthy of a note - at the time. I can recall reading
about
a dispute that Ivins had with the FBI as to how he learned that flask
RMR-1029 contained mutations that could be used as
evidence. Ivins
claimed that an FBI agent told him, but the agent said that wasn't
true. There could be something there. Also, I took notes
about where
to find each of the many interviews the FBI conducted with Bruce
Ivins. Eventually, I'll probably have to print the interview
reports
and go through them with different colored highlighters while making
further notes.

Meanwhile, when I started to put things in order by date, something
else popped out: the likely trigger that caused Ivins to do the first
unauthorized swabbings and cleanings in December of 2001. Here is
my
far-from-complete 2001 timeline for Ivins as it currently appears in my
files:

Tuesday,
September 11 - After
the Twin Towers are stuck, Ivins
goes into a virtual panic telling everyone that USAMRIID should be
evacuated
because a plane that the FAA cannot locate could be headed toward
USAMRIID. Monday,
September 17 - Ivins
leaves work at 7:14 p.m.

The
media letters are
probably mailed on this day - probably by Ivins around 11 p.m.
The
official timeline used by the FBI for the first mailing is: 5:00 p.m.,
9/17/2001 through 8 p.m.,
9/18/2001.

Tuesday,
September 18
- The media letters are postmarked.

Ivins arrives for work at
7:03 a.m.

Wednesday,
October 3
- Bob Stevens is confirmed to have inhalation anthrax.

Thursday,
October 4
- The news breaks about Bob Stevens.

Ivins
sends an email to the
CDC asking if the Florida case involves some Florida strain of anthrax.

Friday,
October 5
- Bob Stevens dies.

Paul
Keim determines that
Stevens was killed by the Ames strain of anthrax.

Saturday
-
Tuesday, October 6 - 9 - The letters to Senators Daschle &
Leahy are mailed some time during this time period. The official
FBI timeline is: 3:30 p.m.,
10/06/01 through 11:00 a.m., 10/09/01.

Tuesday,
October 9
- The two Senate letters are postmarked.

Iowa
State University is
overwhelmed by media reporters wanting to know about the Ames strain.

Wednesday,
October 10
- CNN reports that the anthrax
virus that killed a Lantana man and was found in his
Boca
Raton office appears to be manmade and apparently produced in an American
lab about 50 years ago.

Monday or
Tuesday, October 15 or 16
- The Daschle letter arrives at USAMRIID.

Thursday,
October 18 -
Ivins angrily tells someone via an email that people should be asking
the USDA in Ames, Iowa, about
the Ames strain, not him.

Wednesday,
December 5
- The Leahy letter reaches USAMRIID.

Tuesday,
December 18
- Someone sends a fax of the mailing label from the original Ames
shipment, showing that it actually came from Texas, not from
Iowa. The date is on the fax.

December
date ???
- Ivins
does his first swabbing and cleanup of contaminated areas at USAMRIID.

Hmm. The news didn't break in
the media that the Ames strain came from Texas, not Iowa, until January
29, 2002. But someone
at USAMRIID obviously knew it in mid-December.

Clearly, the motivation for Bruce Ivins' first swabbing and cleaning could have been
the stunning discovery that the Ames strain was NOT a very common
strain used by countless labs all over the world as Ivins thought at
the time of
the mailings, but it was a rare strain that only USAMRIID distributed.

All I need to verify Ivins most likely motive for the December
swabbings and cleaning is to find the date that it was realized that
the Ames strain came from Texas and the exact date that Ivins did his
December 2001 cleaning. I'd bet money that the discovery came
first
and the cleaning came second. If the dates turn out as I expect,

Ivins did his first cleanup because he had
learned that he'd used a rare
strain that could be traced to USAMRIID instead of a common strain that
could not be traced anywhere. Ivins did his second cleanup because he had
learned that the FBI was tracking the attack anthrax back to flask
RMR-1029 which Ivins controlled.

This is fun! And strawberries are only 99 cents a pound at Piggly
Wiggly! Life is good!!

April
5, 2010
- After writing Sunday's comment, I completed my initial read-through
of the 2,728 pages of supplementary documents from the Amerithrax
investigation. It produced 49 pages of notes. In the last
document I read, I came across this comment from a May 28, 2008 FBI
interview of a USAMRIID scientist as described on page 12 in pdf
file
#847359.

XXXXX was
also of the opinion that if the
anthrax-laced letters originated from USAMRIID then the act of preparing the
anthrax powder and loading the envelopes would have to be done in a class 3
hood in Building XXXX.

It's always nice to have
an "expert" agree with something I've just deduced on my own.

The read-through also showed that there are "experts" with opinions of
every variety at USAMRIID. My notes didn't include taking a
tabulation
of how many supporters there were for the various theories about who
was
responsible for the anthrax attacks (there must be over a hundred
interviews of USAMRIID employees in the documents), but I'll try to
roughly summarize the general views of the USAMRIID scientists from
memory:

About a half dozen
scientists felt that
BioPort was responsible. One scientist was adamant about it.Approximately a dozen scientists felt
that the attacks must have
been the work of some foreign government.Many scientists claimed that no one
working at USAMRIID could have created the attack anthrax.One scientist claimed that every scientist working at USAMRIID
was capable of creating the attack anthrax.More than a dozen scientists claimed that
Dr. Ivins was one of the people who could have done it.Many scientists believed that Dr. Ivins
was incapable of such a crime.Many scientists believed that no one at
USAMRIID knew how to dry anthrax into a powder.Several scientists described the most
likely method the culprit used to dry the powder: with chemicals.

The only opinions that seemed to be universal were that Ivins was
"odd," he had few or no friends, he was a "geek," he was a nervous
type, he liked to joke around, and he was socially inept.
But everyone also seemed to believe, as do I, that none of these
factors have anything to do with his guilt or innocence.

The interviews of
USAMRIID scientists also showed that security measures at USAMRIID
were very lax before 9/11 and
the anthrax attacks that followed.
There were NO closed-circuit cameras in the labs or other
key
areas. You could run flask shakers for weeks and no one would
question
it because there were flask shakers in operation all the time.
There
was no problem in taking dangerous materials out of the labs or out of
the
buildings. They even had a term for it: the "VIP" method of
moving
materials: Vial In Pocket.
Everyone simply assumed that whatever work you
were doing - even if it was in the middle of the night - was authorized
and legal.

It also seems clear that the notion that every one of the 350 or so
scientists at USAMRIID had access to flask RMR-1029 is absolute
nonsense.
That notion is based upon the idea that it is impossible
to prove that
scientist-X could not have
found a way to get to flask RMR-1029 without being discovered and
without leaving any trace. It's a conspiracy theorist/True Believer belief based upon the fact that it's impossible to prove the negative.

There was no reason for anyone besides Ivins to pick flask RMR-1029
from among the many samples of anthrax available at
USAMRIID. If
someone wanted to use anthrax to put in the anthrax letters, they had
many OTHER samples to pick from. Even if they wanted to use "the
Dugway spores" (as flask RMR-1029 was generally called) in order
to
blame Dugway for some reason, they could have used any of the samples
that Ivins provided that were cultured from spores in flask
RMR-1029.
However, Ivins' "single colony pick" method of producing such cultures
would make it a near certainty that you would not get all the mutations
that were also in flask RMR-1029.

Ivins chose flask RMR-1029 as the source for the spores he cultured to
put in the anthrax letters because he believed
that those spores were
identical to what was stored at the USDA in Iowa and which he believed
had been distibuted from there to "countless" laboratories all over the
world. Therefore, he believed the spores
were untraceable. No one at USAMRIID knew the true original source of the
contents of flask RMR-1029 -- not even the scientist who originally
obtained them.

But, clearly some people are still convinced of Ivins' innocence -
because they have other theories.

This morning I found a couple emails in my inbox from someone who feels
that I'm biased against Dr. Ivins, and that's the only reason I claim
the evidence shows that Ivins was the anthrax mailer. According
to
her, if I assumed that Ivins
was innocent the way she
does, then I wouldn't be biased - and other explanations can be found
for all the evidence.
After all, in this country, a person
is assumed innocent until proven guilty. And, apparently, to her
that
means
there is no way to prove a person is guilty if he says he isn't -
because, his claim of innocence must
be assumed to be true. His
claims of lack of expertise must also be assumed to be true. His
claims of doing other things at the times the anthrax powders were
being prepared must be assumed to be true. And all the
evidence that
shows he was lying must be assumed to be false or meaningless because we must assume he is
innocent. If we don't, then we're biased.

Who can argue with logic like that? If you argue, that just proves
you are biased.April
4, 2010 - I've gone through 2,483 of the 2,728 pages of
supplementary documents that the DOJ/FBI made public when they closed
the Amerithrax investigation on February 19th. So, I'm 91% done.

Progress has been slow due to the need to write detailed notes, due to
ongoing arguments with conspiracy theorists and True Believers, and due
to 101 other things that I need to do as part of my "normal"
life. Plus, sometimes the Amerithrax documents I've been reading
require careful analysis to understand their implications. And
that always brings the reading to a grinding halt. For
example, page 3 of pdf
file #847376 contains this:

IVINS stated that the contents of the
[Daschle] letter contained a powder that was unlike anything he had
ever dealt with
previously. Upon examination, the powder
contained in the letter seemed to float easily in the air. IVINS
was surprised by the fineness of the
powder and stated that "it floated
around inside the hood
like dust in the
sunlight." Ivins stated that due
to the ease at which the powder became airborne, USAMRIID personnel
should have
conducted testing within a laboratory that bore an overhead containment
hood.

And page 4 has this:

IVINS
disagreed with XXXXX processing of the Daschle
letter in Room XXX as the BSL-2
laboratory was not adequate to contain
aerosolized B.a. powder.

Those passages seem
to
indicate
two things: (1) Ivins didn't examine the Daschle letter inside a
biosafety cabinet where
everything is enclosed and a person handles materials with rubber
gloves that
are built into the cabinet. He examined the Daschle letter under
a biosafety hood,
which allowed him to insert his arms under an sheet of Plexiglas
to handle the letter with his (presumably) latex-gloved hands.
And (2), Ivins thought that others should have used similar precautions
when they handled the Daschle letter, but they didn't.

I'm not a microbiologist, and I tend to think of such work as I've seen
it done in movies like "The Andromeda Strain" and "Outbreak." But
those movies were evidently about Biosafety Level FOUR
(BL-4) work. Nearly
all the handling of the anthrax letters at USMRIID after the
mailings was evidently done in B2 an B3 labs. It seems very
likely that the original
loading of the
various letters with anthrax powders was done the same way.
(Richard
Preston's book "The Demon In The Freezer" says that a BL-4 lab was used initially, by at least one
person. But, that was because people were afraid that the powder
might be mixed with something even more deadly than anthrax:
smallpox.) The FBI's web site shows the Leahy letter being
opened inside a biosafety cabinet. And
there are also pictures
of people in biosafety suits examining barrels of mail - with a biosafety hood clearly visible in
two (#3 and #5) of the six images.

I don't know how it can ever be proved, but it wouldn't totally
surprise
me if Dr. Ivins didn't use anything more enclosed than a biosafety hood when preparing the anthrax
letters. That's probably why he seems to have left tiny
amounts of
anthrax spores all over his lab, his office and elsewhere. It's a
virtual certainty that he didn't even imagine
that the spores could escape through the folded letters and the
envelopes after he had taped the envelopes shut. No one
did. So, he very likely didn't think the spores would escape from
under the hood, either.

Evidently, Dr. Ivins' luck wasn't all bad. It was certainly good
luck for him that he
didn't infect himself when he
prepared the letters. (He was vaccinated, but a massive exposure
can overwhelm the protection of vaccinations.) And, it was
very good luck for him that no one did any swabbings around Ft. Detrick
to
find spores from the letters before Ivins had TWO OPPORTUNITIES to clean things
up.

The same .pdf file identified above also contains on pages 1 thru 26 an
extremely interesting May 24, 2005 analysis of the two known occasions
where Ivins did those unauthorized swabbings and cleanups.
Starting on
page 6, the author of the analysis describes how Dr. Ivins'
explanations do not match his actions. In other words, Ivins was lying, giving the FBI
reasons why he did things, but his actions show they were not the real reasons.
Or, as the author puts it:

IVINS'
justifications for his actions following the independent sampling
contradicted his explanation of motives for conducting the survey in
the first place.

Here is part of the analysis of the December 2001 swabbings and cleanup:

If truly motivated by a
concern
of contamination on the cold-side of USAMRIID, upon evidence of such
contamination, why did IVINS not pursue more extensive methods toward
correcting the problem? How
would improper handing of the B.a. samples be corrected without
passing along information that the containment system was not working
properly?

Why conduct the survey in the first place if he did not want to cause
alarm, especially if he suspected that he would find contamination?

Ivins had the courage to conduct the swabbing without command approval,
yet lacked the initiative to inform the appropriate authorities when
the results were presumptively positive?

Ivins was obviously
concerned enough about possible contamination to knowingly violate
USAMRIID protocol, yet at the moment his concerns were validated, he
took no actions toward addressing the problems for the benefit of
USAMRIID.

The excuse that Dr. Ivins used for doing the first swabbing and cleanup
in December of 2001 was that the co-worker with whom he shared an
office was worried that the people
in Building 1412 who were handing the anthrax letters were not being
careful enough. She was particularly concerned that handling an
anthrax letter under a hood could result in spores clinging to the
gloves that were being used, and when a person's hands are taken out
from under the hood, the spores on the gloves would come along, instead
of getting sucked out through the air purifiers.

Here is more of the analysis (information in brackets [example] are my
relatively safe assumptions of
some of what was redacted, XX's
indicate the rest of the redacted information):

If motivated by concern for [his
co-worker], why did IVINS not inform [her] of the presumptive positive
results from [her] desk? IVINS confirmed during an
interview that he did not inform [her] of his findings; however,
reasons for not telling [her] were not provided. The assessment
by IVINS that the level of contamination within the office was not a
health risk to himself, XXXXXX did not diminish the significance of
finding contamination outside of the hot suites.

On page 11 there is a similar analysis of Dr. Ivins' unauthorized
swabbings and cleaning in April 2002:

IVINS' explanations of his
motivations for the April 2002 independent survey were contradictory to
his actions following the December 2001 survey.

If
IVINS
continued to be legitimately concerned that [some other scientist] was
contaminating the office space, why did he not inform [that scientist]
of his previous swabbing results, or give [him or her] some guidance
with regard to safe handling of B.a.?

One
of
IVINS' previous arguments for not notifying USAMRIID command of his
December 2001 swabbing was that he believed he had sufficiently cleaned
the contaminated desk area; however, IVINS used the possibility that
[his co-worker's] desk was not completely decontaminated in December
2001 as one of the reasons to justify further swabbing.

[Someone else's] survey of the XXX suite yielded no indication of a
breach of containment from the hot-side to the cold-side. Why
were IVINS' convictions so strong regarding possible contamination on
the cold-side, while the concerns of other experienced researchers,
such as XXXXX and XXXXX were satisfied by the results of [the other
person's] survey within XXX.

It was evidently clear to the author of the analysis that Ivins was
just making up excuses for what he did. Why would Ivins do
that? The next part of the analysis from pages 12 and 13 suggests
why:

During an interview on
March 31,
2005, IVINS claimed that the path he chose to swab was the path that
the Daschle letter took from [a specific area] to that through the
pass-box in the wall of suite B3. To the contrary,
IVINS did not swab the hallway or locations near [the specific area.]
Aside from the areas near the B3 pass-box and the freezers in the
hallway outside the B3 suite, IVINS did not extensively survey the
hallway leading to B3. Of the 56 samples collected on April
15-16, 2002, 38 samples were
collected from the men's locker room, and 10 samples derived
from locations near the B3 pass-box and the tops of freezers in the
hallway between the B2/B3 hallway.Based
upon IVINS' claim that he swabbed the path of the Daschle letter, and
given the fact that over half the survey samples derived from his
office, the following question could be posed: Did IVINS have
reason to suspect contamination in his office because he had intimate
knowledge that the Daschle letter was present in room XXX at some point
in time?

And, lastly, there's an analysis of the fact that Ivins'
Bacteriology Division was in some kind of rivalry with the Diagnostic
Systems Division (DSD). This is from page 13:

IVINS expressed, during
multiple
interviews and in sworn statements, his concerns regarding the unsafe
laboratory practices of DSD employees. As a justification for his
unauthorized environmental surveys, IVINS cited information that DSD
personnel did not utilize safety precautions. However, during
neither the December 2001 survey, nor the April 2002 survey, did IVINS
swab areas associated with DSD laboratories or personnel, aside from
[his co-worker's] desk. According to IVINS, [a superior] inwardly
seemed pleased with IVINS' finding of contamination because it allowed
[that superior] to "point a finger' at DSD for poor laboratory safety
procedures. Notably, the
majority of the B.a. contamination identified on the cold-side of
Building 1425 was in locations associated with IVINS more so than DSD.

Then there is also the fact that when others did swabbings, they didn't
find as many spores as Ivins found. It was as if Ivins knew exactly
where to look because it's where
he'd carried the anthrax letters he'd prepared. Of course,
the "slippery"
Dr. Ivins, being an accomplished liar, simply claimed that he
did a
better job of swabbing than the other scientists. Who could prove
otherwise?

Then there's the fact that the Diagnostic
Systems Division areas where the Daschle letter was handled most
extensively
were NOT contaminated. Yet, Ivins tried to get people to believe
that moving the letter inside ziploc bags from the DSD area to his area
in Building 1425 left a trail of contamination that Ivins needed to
clean up.

Then there's the fact that those two cleanups in December of 2001 and
April of 2002 were the only
times Ivins ever did such cleanups in areas outside of the hot
suites. It was not
something he did routinely.

It's important to note that all this comes from a May 24, 2005
analysis by an FBI agent (possibly a profiler). That was more
than three
years before Ivins was told that he was about to be indicted by
a Grand Jury for multiple murders. And, of course, he committed
suicide shortly afterward -- in July of 2008.

And something else pops out from my own analysis: April 2002 was
not just the time when Ivins attempted to destroy
evidence by doing a second
cleaning of his lab, it was also the
same month when
he tried to mislead the FBI by submitting that infamous false sample to the FBI
repository.

On April 15 and 16, 2002, Ivins did his unauthorized swabbing and
cleaning. That same April,
probably before the 15th, Ivins received a subpoena telling him to
submit two new representations
of the
contents of flask RMR-1029 to the FBI's repository. Instead of
complying with the subpoena, he either
supplied samples that
deliberately excluded the mutations in flask RMR-1029 or he submitted
samples that were not actually from flask RMR-1029. Either
way, it should be clear that Ivins was acting like a guilty person by
attempting to mislead the investigation and by destroying evidence.

Here is a note I made about another
FBI report (also probably from a
profiler) in that same pdf file:

Pages 99 -
102 contain a July 18, 2005 report
where Ivins'
state of mind is evaluated by analyzing a book that Ivins
claimed got him
interested in science: "Arrowsmith," by Sinclair Lewis.The person writing the report says,

Martin Arrowsmith, the protagonist,
learns that, in order to ensure his experimental plague vaccine works, he must
allow some people to die of plague instead of immunizing them.Arrowsmith's mentor, Max Gottlieb, teaches
him that people have to die in
the short run in order for the world as a whole
to be saved in the long run.In
addition, Gottlieb takes a cynical view of the world, and feels that it
may not
be worth saving in the first place, with its unlovable people and
overcrowded
conditions.This satirical novel
presents Arrowsmith's and Gottlieb's view of society and how they, as
scientists, must be more loyal to the search for truth and scientific
breakthroughs than to soft-heartedness and temporary solutions.

That scientific philosophy from "Arrowsmith" fits perfectly
with the anthrax mailer's apparent motive for sending the anthrax
letters: To alert America of the dangers of a bioweapons attack by
Muslim extremists.

Obviously, FBI investigators had a pretty good idea in May and July of
2005 that
Dr. Brice Ivins was the anthrax mailer. It just took a lot longer
to make certain Ivins acted alone and to build a solid legal case that
would convince any jury that
Ivins was guilty of five murders beyond any reasonable doubt.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, March 28,
2010, thru Saturday, April 3, 2010
April 3, 2010 - I'm still not
finding any details about Dr. Hatfill's upcoming interviews on "The
Today Show" or in The Atlantic magazine. All I've seen is an
unverified comment that Hatfill will be speaking at the National
Press Club in May. Looks like some kind of "media blitz" could be
in the works.

March
28, 2010 - I've been looking for more
information about the upcoming interviews with Dr. Steven Hatfill on
the "Today Show" with Matt Lauer and in The Atlantic magazine.
But, so far, I haven't found any dates or other details.

I've also been going through the 2,728 pages of supplemental Amerithrax
documents the FBI made public on Feb. 19. I've examined about
1,500 pages so far, creating 30 pages of notes. Here are some of
my notes from pdf
file #847418:

Pages 18 - 19 describe a
September 20, 2004 meeting where
USAMRIID agrees to allow all of its computers to be examined by the FBI.There's this on page 18:

IVINS advised
that
there is a laptop computer on his hand receipt, however he has never
used it
and cannot locate the computer.

Page 30 has this information:

Details:Data from aerosol challenges involving Bacillus anthracis (Ba) for the time
period August 1998 to September 1999 was analyzed
to determine potential windows of opportunity for removal of
post-challenge
Ames during a ten-day period following each aerosol challenge.It was
estimated based upon spore concentrations of material used that any
aerosol challenge
involving greater than or equal to three animals would constitute
enough
available Ba to have assembled the anthrax-laced letters. All Ames
challenges in the time period for which key card access records are
available
involved at least three animals.

On pages 8, 23, 37 and elsewhere in that .pdf file,
people at Ft. Detrick are asked if they ever used "modified G
sporulation media." That makes me wonder if there wasn't some
indication in the attack spores that "modified G sporulation media" was
used to create the spores.

More notes:

Pages 40 -
46
seem to be a December 1, 2004 "project"
to document everyone at Ft.Detrick
who
handled the anthrax letters and envelopes as part
of the FBI investigation.

On
10/26/2001 "Scent
was extracted from the letter and envelope by PST XXXXX ..."DNA, fingerprint and ink examinations are
performed.

Page 45 describes the
handling
of the Leahy letter.It reaches USAMRIID
on Dec. 5, 2001.On page 46 there is this:

At
11.00 a.m.
[on December 9, 2001]
FBI employee XXXXX (now a Special Agent) extracted
scent from the Leahy letter and envelope at FBI headquarters.

So, they did attempt to
extract the
culprit's scent from the letters. It was done, of course, after
any spores remaining on or inside the paper of the letters and
envelopes had been killed by radiation, so the bloodhounds would be
safe. It still seems highly unlikely that they'd get any
worthwhile results after all the precautions taken by the anthrax
mailer and all the handling by post office employees, but they still
tried.

That's as far as I've gotten in that particular .pdf file. I've
been reading the .pdf files in reverse order (newest first).

Page 4 seems to indicate
that, in his lab, only Ivins and
one or two other persons made spores from 1988 to 2004.At the bottom of page 4 and into page 5 there
is this:

In
1989,
IVINS was working with
XXXXX.They were looking at the quality
of spores grown in Leighton and Doi media versus the quality of spores
grown in
agar.They
found that spores grown in
Leighton and Doi media were "hotter", cleaner, nicer, smaller, less
likely to clump, and aersolize better.

On page 5 there's
this:

Ivins noted that he is making
nearly 1 trillion spores a week for USAMRIID, the National
Institute of
Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the Centers for Disease
Control
(CDC), etc.

Page 6
explains
very clearly that flask RMR-1030 was created
BEFORE flask RMR-1029.It also has a lot
of detail about why Ivins created flask RMR-1029.

XXXXX
has no knowledge of any Ba fermentation
being performed, but
believes the current spore production procedure and acquisition of wet
spore
preparations is perceived as an issue.XXXXX
elaborated by saying that spore preparations
provided by BRUCE
IVINS lack overall consistency in preparation parameters between
batches.This consistency diminished along
with the
Dugway produced spores (writer believes these Dugway spores to be
RMR-1029).XXXXX believes that
IVINS grows batches of spores in order to meet the
quantitative demand, with little parameter consistency between batches.

Pages 10 - 12
contain a January 12, 2007 interview with
someone at Ft.Detrick
who
believes that Ivins had the
ability to produce the spores used in the attacks.

Pages 13 -
14
contain a January 23, 2007 interview with
someone else at Ft.Detrick
who
believes that
Ivins had the ability to produce the spores used in the attacks.

Page 17 has
this:

Ba spores used by the
Aerobiology
group were always provided by BRUCE IVINS, who was known as the "star
spore grower."

Page 24
says that
Ivins liked to take showers at Ft.Detrick
on days when he wasn't working, and he went into Ft.Detrick
to get away from home, to use the
Internet, etc.

Page 34 says that
Building 1412 was not compartmentalized
like Building 1425, which meant that the entire building 1412 was
considered
"hot."

Page 36 has
another person saying that Bruce Ivins
could have made the attack anthrax.

It's all interesting
stuff. A lot of work which I would have assumed was done in
biosafety cabinets is
actually done under "hoods".
A
"hood" is a work station where there's a sheet of Plexiglas between
your face and the equipment, but you can reach under the Plexiglas to
use the equipment. (It's like what they have at an
all-you-can-eat buffet to keep people from breathing and sneezing on
the food in the steamers. Click HERE,
HERE,
and HERE
for pictures.) I gather that, in the case of Ft. Detrick, the
idea is to keep things you are working on from splashing into your eyes
or onto your face. I wondered about negative air pressure and got
this information from the
Internet:

"
Air
from booths, tents and hoods may be discharged into the room in which
the device is located or it may be exhausted to the outside. If the air
is discharged into the room, a HEPA filter should be incorporated at
the discharge duct or vent of the device. The exhaust fan should be
located on the discharge side of the HEP A filter to ensure that the
air pressure in the filter housing and booth is negative with respect
to adjacent areas. Uncontaminated air from the room will flow into the
booth through all openings, thus preventing infectious droplet nuclei
in the booth from escaping into the room.”

I also noticed several occasions in reading the files where Dr. Ivins
seems to made a point to FBI investigators that growing spores on blood
agar results in spores that are difficult to clean. It was like
he was trying to point away
from the use of blood agar to create the spores in the attack letters.

There are also a lot of details which seemed to suggest that the
anthrax killer may have used
discarded test
cultures instead of starting with totally new batches. Dr.
Ivins seemed to have made it a practice to dump used Petri dishes,
plates and flasks into an
autoclave for periods of time until the
autoclave was filled, then he
would turn on the autoclave and sterilize what was inside. It
seems possible that, if he was using material from flask RMR-1029 to do
cultures on dishes and then put the dishes into the autoclave, in a
week or so he might have enough spores in the autoclave to fill the
anthrax letters. I don't see how anyone could tell the difference
between those spores and spores created from scratch for the sole
purpose of putting them into the anthrax letters. The
powders in the media letters, in particular, seem very likely to have
been created that way, i.e., by taking mature cultures out of the
autoclave instead of starting from scratch.

When I take a break from reading the documents to do other things,
pieces sometimes start falling together in my mind. And I
start wondering about the details in each step of the tasks that Dr.
Ivins went through nearly every work day:

1. When Building 1412 needed some spores for animal testing, Dr.
Ivins would receive the request. He was Ft. Detrick's "star spore
grower."

2. Creating a new batch of spores for Building 1412 was never done
by inoculating a new flask of
growth media with spores taken directly
from flask RMR-1029. Evidently, there was always an
intermediate step involving a Petri dish.

3. Ivins would dip a cotton swab into a liquid containing spores
that came directly or indirectly from flask RMR-1029, and he would then
use those spores to inoculate a Petri
dish of growth medium.

4. The next day, Ivins would look at all the bacterial colonies
growing in the Petri dish, and he'd select one of
the colonies to use to grow the much larger batch of spores for
sending to Building 1412 for testing. He'd use a "loop" to gather
up that one specific colony and use the spores from that single colony
to inoculate a flask of growth medium.

5. And the Petri dish and the rest
of the colonies in it would be placed in the autoclave to be
sterilized when the autoclave was full. Ivins was probably
tossing away at least ten times as
many spores as he used to inoculate the flask. And those
colonies probably wouldn't immediately stop forming spores just because
they
were put in the autoclave.

6. Because Ivins used his "single colony pick" method, the spores that were
left behind in the Petri dishes were far more likely to contain all the
mutations that were in flask RMR-1029 than the
spores he grew for Building 1412.

7. That probably explains why there were so few samples at Ft.
Detrick which contained the four mutations. The samples in
Building 1412 were grown from single colonies, which means every
mutation in them would likely be a new
mutation, not any mutations
that were transferred over from flask RMR-1029.

8. When other labs received the multiple-milligram quantities of
spores that were poured directly
out of flask RMR-1029, those spores were to be entirely consumed in tests.
They were NOT used as any kind of seed stock for new growths. So,
the only sample they'd have that matched flask RMR-1029 would be a
sample from flask RMR-1029 that Ivins provided but which had not yet
been
entirely consumed in testing.

No matter where I look, everything continues to point to Dr.
Ivins, never
away from Dr. Ivins.

Of course, the conspiracy theorists and True Believers tell me that's
because I'm only looking at the FBI's evidence - which they also tell
me isn't really evidence. If the FBI would have looked elsewhere,
they would have found real evidence against someone else. And,
each believes there is a mountain of evidence pointing to their own
suspect, if the FBI would just look for it. So, there are dozens
of undiscovered mountains of evidence pointing to dozens of other
suspects. And the actual mountain of solid evidence before me doesn't
really exist. It's not really evidence, they tell me. I
just believe it is -- the same way they believe it isn't. I just
need to understand that imaginary, undiscovered evidence is far more
important than real evidence. I just need to understand the
importance of total nonsense.

Only about 1,200 pages left to read. Groan.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, March 21,
2010, thru Saturday, March 27, 2010
March 25, 2010 - Hmm. The
rabid Right Wing web site "Accuracy In Media" actually has something
worth
reading. The article has a typical inflamatory title, "Obama
Obstructs Oversight of FBI in Anthrax Case," but it also contains
this information:

Dr. Steven Hatfill, one of the innocent
victims of the FBI investigation, is preparing to go public with
his account of how the Department of Justice (DOJ) violated his rights
and tried to ruin his career and reputation. He will be the subject of a forthcoming
Atlanticmagazine article and will be sitting
down for an interview by the NBC "Today Show's" Matt Lauer.

The "Accuracy In Media" article is also
very interesting because it cites some well-known conspiracy theorists
and True Believers and explains why they do not think that the FBI
found the real culprit. The article concludes with this:

If Ivins didn't do it, as
these analysts suggest, then the perpetrators are still free, America
remains vulnerable to a biological weapons attack, and the FBI is
clueless about the nature of the threat we face.

On top of this, President
Obama doesn't want Congress to get to the bottom of what really
happened.

And, on top of that, the sky is
falling!!!!

If the conspiracy theorists and True Believers are right, that means
nearly everyone in the
government is lying about nearly everything,
the lies
are perpetuated from administration to administration, Americans
never went to the moon, 9/11 was a CIA plot, thousands of government
employees are covering up who really killed John F. Kennedy, and the
Earth is really flat because evidence
is something that only evil government conspirators provide, while it
is
only beliefs
which truly matter -- to conspiracy theorists and True Believers, the
only people who really know
anything.
March 24, 2010 - From the
For-What-It's-Worth Department there are these two bits of information:

1. The documents released by the FBI make it very clear that Dr.
Ivins was becoming the focus of the Amerithrax investigation in the
early months of 2005. On April 4, 2005, Dr. Hatfill advised the
FBI that he wanted to have his lawyer present during all further
interviews.

2. After spending 4 years in charge of the Amerithrax
investigation, FBI Inspector Richard L. Lambert transferred to the
Knoxville Field Office in September of 2006. So, Lambert was in charge
when the investigation began to focus on Ivins, and he was still in
charge for the next 1-3/4 years as the case against Ivins continued to
develop.

March 23, 2010 - I've been digging
through the 2,700
pages of supplementary data that the FBI/DOJ provided when they
closed the Amerithrax case on February 19. I'm a long way from
being done, but
some of the things I've found already are very interesting to me.
For example, here are a couple paragraphs from page 6 of pdf
file #847444:

ADMINSTRATIVE: On January 13, 2005,
the hard drive of IVINS' assigned USAMRIID computer was copied by the
FBI with
his consent. A review of the hard
drive copy revealed that e-mails for the year 2001
appeared to be missing from the hard drive, although e-mail activities
for the
prior and subsequent years were located.
IVINS was asked by interviewing agents to explain the reason for this
omission.

IVINS advised
that he was very surprised by the interviewing Agents' claim that his
2001
e-mails were missing from his hard drive.
IVINS said he archives e-mails by subject, not by date, however, he
believes e-mail for this time period should be on his computer.

Ah, the "slippery" Dr. Ivins has an unverifiable answer for
everything: The emails should be there. I don't know what
happened to them. Are you sure you looked in the right
place? Maybe YOU accidentally deleted them.

On page 199 of pdf
file #847545 there's this information about the day the first letters were probably
mailed:

As I wrote in Sunday's
comment. There appears to be an endless stream of facts pointing to Dr. Ivins as the anthrax
mailer and NEVER anything that points away from Dr. Ivins.
The fact that there were a hundred or more people who could have
accessed flask RMR-1029 does NOT point away from Dr. Ivins. It
points to Dr. Ivins as one
of those hundred or more people. From there, it's a process of
elimination.

There seem to be dozens of
FBI interviews with Dr. Ivins in pdf files #847443
and #847444.
A common thread seems to be that Dr. Ivins has a very long list of other people who could have sent
the letters. He seems to mention a name or two during almost
every interview, and he sometimes produces lists of people the FBI should talk
with. Mostly, though, they seem to be people in another division
of USAMRIID, not
in Ivins' Bacteriology Division.

The conspiracy theorists and True Believers made endless accusations
against the FBI when they couldn't find emails from the times of the
mailings to prove that Ivins couldn't have gone to New Jersey at that
time. The idea that Ivins may have destroyed the emails to
hide evidence to so
they couldn't show that he was NOT on his computer at those times never
seems to have occurred to the conspiracy theorists and True
Believers.

The conspiracy theorists and True Believers also pointed
to discrepancies on the log for flask RMR-1029, suggesting that the FBI
must
have doctored something. But there are numerous interviews with
Dr. Ivins where he is asked to explain why the logs have parts that are
whited out or where different copies of the logs do not seem to agree
with each other. There doesn't seem to be anything sinister
involved. Ivins just had his own idea of how to do things.

The conspiracy theorists and True Believers (including some in the
media) have also claimed that
flask RMR-1029 was sometimes
stored
in Building 1412 because one
version the log for
flask RMR-1029 showed Building 1412 as its location. Someone
even suggested that it was always
stored in Building 1412 until 2004
when Ivins requested it
be moved to Building 1425. But page 98
of pdf
file #847443 reports on a phone call from Dr. Ivins to the FBI
where Ivins explains that flask RMR-1029 was never taken to building 1412, they only took aliquots to 1412.
And page 10 in pdf
file #847444 contains statements that flask RMR-1029 was
NEVER stored in building 1412, but was ALWAYS stored in building
1425. It appears that when the shipments of spores from Dugway
arrived, there was some thought of keeping them in Building 1412, but
that never happened even though the form temporarily said it did.

The conspiracy theorists and True Believers point out that, on page 32
of the
FBI/DOJ summary report, it says that just before the times of the mailings, Dr.
Ivins used the USAMRIID
library where a copy machine was
located. (The letters in
the envelopes were copies, not originals.) Visiting the library
was not a common thing for
Dr. Ivins.
But on page 17 of the summary report it says that the anthrax letters
were not produced on the copy
machine in the library.

To me, that could mean that Ft. Detrick
bought a new copy machine between September 2001 and the time in 2005
or 2007 when the FBI examined the copy machine in the library to see if
it produced the attack letters. OR the machine could have been
cleaned and overhauled a half dozen times during the intervening years,
making any match impossible to determine. So far, I haven't
seen any details about that. But the conspiracy theorists and
True Believers have plenty of explanations, all of which involve
massive FBI conspiracies to mislead the investigation.
On page 11 of pdf
file #847444 there is Dr. Ivins' explanation for the 100ml math
error on the log for flask RMR-1029. It was just that: a math
error. Nothing sinister going on.

On page 107-108 of pdf
file #847443 there's this information about the log for RMR-1029:

IVINS' record
of the dissemination of Reference
Material Receipt (RMR) 1029, the Ames spores which were a combination
of
Dugway-produced spores and spores made by IVINS, was kept only for the
purpose
of allowing the researchers to estimate how much of the material was
left so
they would not run out of spores for aerosol challenges.The record was
not kept as any kind of
precise inventory for security reasons.
The amounts of remaining material were only estimates and were not
accurately
measured for each entry.

One
problem with the 2,728 pages of supplementary information is that a lot
of material is not in order by date. So far, I've got about 25
pages of notes on what I've read that could be of further
interest. And I've only gone through 1,358 of the 2,728
pages (50%). March
21, 2010 - In a black briefcase seized from
Dr. Ivins' home during the search performed on the night of
November 1-2, 2007, the FBI found a stack of articles and other
materials
downloaded and printed off the Internet on May 5 and May 10,
2005. (See FBI
pdf file #847447, pages 117 - 186.) The articles printed on
the 5th were
mostly about the use of forensic evidence in court. The articles
printed on May 10 mostly
related to
the validity of handwriting analysis
in court. Any mention of handwriting analysis makes me
curious, and I wondered what had prompted Dr. Ivins to research that
particular
subject. The articles seemed to be about how the analysis of
handwriting is not a science,
little can be scientifically proven. Handwriting analysis is
really all about the opinions
of experts. And, to combat the opinions of the prosecution's
"experts," Dr. Ivins lawyer would just need to find a certified
"expert" whose opinion would disagree with the prosecution's and
thereby help create reasonable doubt. Ivins also printed out
several
lists of experts with sufficient credentials to testify in court.

Dr. Ivins was the type of suspect cops call "slippery." He
always had answers for everything, sometimes a multiple choice of
answers. And if all those answers weren't enough, he would just
claim he couldn't remember.

Early May 2005
seems to have been a slow time in the Amerithrax investigation.
A check of my archives showed no news
articles about the case between April 27 and May 14 of 2005.
Checking my
comments for that period,
I found that New Scientist magazine had just reviewed my book, and I
wrote a comment about it on May 1. Wondering if
that review or something related to it might have caused Dr. Ivins to
visit my
web site, I decided to check my web site logs for
that time period.

Starting with the log for May, 10, I found several IP (Internet
Protocol) visitor addresses which appeared to be Maryland addresses,
and one was actually Ft. Detrick.
It was an IP address I have identified as a "regular" visitor
to my site. But I don't know if that IP address was also
considered to
be a "regular" back in 2005. (In March of 2010, that same IP
address is still shows up in my log files a couple times a week or
more.)

At 2:26 p.m. on May 10th, 2005, the Ft. Detrick visitor simply accessed
a Science magazine
article
titled "Building Microbial Forensics as a
Response to Bioterrorism." The article wasn't included in the
stack of
articles in Dr. Ivins briefcase that related to forensics. But I
doubted it was just a coincidence. The visitor was very likely
Dr. Ivins.

Since the visitor went directly
to that article without doing a search
for it, I checked the log for the 9th and, sure enough, at 4:32 a.m. that morning, the
same IP address
was used to perform a search for "Scientific Working Group on
Microbial Genetics and Forensics."
That search led to the Science
magazine article on my site. So, he found the article at 4:32 in
the morning on the
9th and looked at it again on
the afternoon of the 10th.

But, disappointingly, there were no other Ft. Detrick accesses to
anything else on those two days. And nothing related to
handwriting. The 9th was a Monday, and the 10th was a
Tuesday. There were no visits on the weekend just passed,
nor on the
previous Friday. But on at 7:35 a.m. on Thursday the 5th, someone
at Ft. Detrick performed a Google search for "anthrax
burial sites afghanistan."
And at 9:07 a.m., someone did a search for "anthrax incidents
washington post." That's the date Ivins downloaded and printed
several articles related to forensics.

There were no Ft. Detrick visits to my site on the 1st through 4th of
May. Working in the other
direction, I found a visit from Ft. Detrick on May 12th.
The search was for "pfpa cbrn." It took some research of
my
own to figure that one out. The Washington
Post article the search found
didn't contain "pfpa cbrn" but it mentioned the Pentagon Force
Protection Agency (PFPA) Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear
Directorate (PFPA-CBRN). Then I noticed that, according to my log
file, the
person at Ft. Detrick who performed that search
used a Mac. The
other visits were via a PC.
So, the
one IP address seems to cover Internet accesses from Ft.
Detrick by multiple computers.

That made me wonder if Dr. Ivins may have used his computer at home to
look for
the articles on handwriting. So, I looked at some of the other IP
addresses
from Maryland. The only one of interest on May 10 was a Google
search
for "work sheet on leave requested jeanne bussard
center."
Thinking it might be a mental health facility where Ivins had gone for
treatment, I did a Google search for "Ivins + Jeanne Bussard
Center."
I found two news articles which mentioned both. But, this time
it seems there was a slight coincidence involved.

The first article was from USA Today dated October 14, 2004 and titled "Anthrax
Escape at Ft. Detrick." Dr. Ivins is mentioned near the
beginning of the article:

Bruce Ivins was troubled by
the
dust, dirt and clutter on his officemate's desk, and not just because
it looked messy. He suspected the dust was laced with anthrax.

And he was in a position to
know.
Ivins, a biodefense expert, and his officemate were deeply involved in
Operation Noble Eagle - the government's response to the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks that killed almost 3,000
Americans and the anthrax attacks that killed five more less than a
month later.

It was December 2001.
Ivins, an
authority on anthrax, was one of the handful of researchers at the U.S.
Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at
Fort Detrick, Md., who prepared spores of the
deadly bacteria to test anthrax vaccines in animals. He knew enough to
grow
alarmed when his officemate
complained, as she had frequently of late, about
sloppy
handling of samples coming into the lab that could be tainted with
anthrax.

The female "officemate" isn't identified. It seems her complaints
to him gave the "slippery" Dr. Ivins the opportunity to swab
down and sterilize a lot of areas where he might have left spores from
the mailing. Around the mid-point in the lengthy USA Today
article is the mention of the Jeanne Bussard Center.

Fear that spores had
escaped into
the community in USAMRIID's dirty laundry prompted officials to
dispatch technicians to the base's laundry at
the Jeanne Bussard Center,
a rehabilitation center for the
developmentally
disabled in Frederick.

So, the Jeanne Bussard Center does USAMRIID's
laundry. It had nothing to do with Dr. Ivins' mental
problems.

The second article was from The Frederick
News-Post and said the same thing about the Jeanne Bussard Center,
except that it's an undated
article (possibly from
2006) that is mostly about the April
2002 incident where Dr. Ivins again felt
the need to do a lot of
cleaning in the Ft. Detrick building without first notifying
anyone. But,
the article also mentions
Dr. Ivins and the December 2001 incident:

Concern about anthrax spores
in
supposedly clean areas began months before the April 2002 breach,
during late 2001. That fall, anthrax-laced letters were mailed to Sens.
Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), as well as media
outlets in New York and Florida.

In
December
2001, a USAMRIID technician told Dr. Bruce Ivins, a microbiologist in
USAMRIID’s Division of Bacteriology, that she was concerned she was
exposed to anthrax spores when handling an anthrax-contaminated letter.

So, as we know, Ivins
swabbed
about 20 different areas down with bleach. The article later says:

Dr.
Ivins, who still works in the
bacteriology division but declined to
comment for this story, tested the technician’s desk area that
December and found growth that had the earmarks of anthrax.

He
decontaminated her desk, computer, keypad and monitor, but didn’t
notify his superiors.

In the USAMRMC report, Dr.
Ivins
told Army investigators he did the unauthorized testing
because he was
concerned the powder in the anthrax letters and other samples might not
be adequately contained.

He
again became suspicious of
contamination April 8, 2002, when
two researchers reported potential exposures to anthrax after noticing
flasks they were working with had leaked anthrax, crusting the outside
of the glass tubes.

USAMRIID
officials found anthrax spores in several rooms within a containment
suite near the potential exposure.

Nasal
swabs from one scientist involved
in the incident tested positive.
The scientist had been previously vaccinated and did not contract the
disease.

When the contamination was
discovered, Dr. Ivins performed an unauthorized sampling
of areas outside containment April 15, according to the USAMRMC report.

He
found
anthrax spores in his office area; a passbox, which uses UV radiation
to allow personnel to safely transfer materials from labs to outside
areas such as hallways; and an area where scientists and technicians
change from civilian clothing into laboratory garb.

Dr.
Ivins found heavy growth of Ames-strain
anthrax,
a
pathogenic or disease-causing form of the agent, on rubber molding
surrounding the noncontainment side of a passbox.

His
office area tested positive for
Ames anthrax spores. The men’s
change
room tested positive
for Ames spores and a few colonies of Vollum 1B, another
pathogenic form.

The
anthrax found in these areas was a
different strain from that in
the potential anthrax exposure April 8, suggesting at least two
incidents of contamination. USAMRIID works with three anthrax
strains:
pathogenic strains Ames and Vollum 1B and Sterne, a nonpathogenic
vaccine strain.

It appears that last
paragraph is
saying that the April 8, 2002, incident where two researchers noticed
leaking flasks did not
involve the Ames strain, but the testing that found spores around
Ivins' office and passbox did
involve the Ames strain. The "slippery" Dr. Ivins used the
accident by the "two researchers" as an excuse to do more unauthorized
swabbing and cleaning.

There's more in the News-Post article about contamination around Dr.
Ivins work
areas and the mention of the Jeanne Bussard Center:

On April 16, 2002, Dr. Ivins
notified the USAMRIID
Bacteriology Division chief of the preliminary results from his April
15 sampling. USAMRIID confirmed the contamination April 16.

On
April
18, official testing found
anthrax spores in areas
outside containment, including Dr. Ivins’ office and near a passbox.

A
sample
taken near the passbox tested positive for more than
200 spores of Ames-strain anthrax.

The
testing also revealed spores in a men’s
change room,
posing a risk of contamination to the Jeanne
Bussard center on South
Market Street, where USAMRIID’s laundry is routinely processed after
being sterilized at Fort Detrick.

The Army’s Center for Health
Promotion and Preventive
Medicine found no anthrax contamination when it tested the center in
the days after the breach.

USAMRIID sterilizes all
laundry
leaving change rooms, using
high temperatures and pressure in machines called autoclaves.

USAMRIID Safety Officer Maj.
Chris
Ansell recently said all
laundry has been autoclaved for years, before April 2002, and tests of
the Jeanne Bussard center
were an extra step in protecting its workers.

So, what did I learn with
all
this research? I didn't find a single thing related to the stack
of articles about handwriting analysis which Dr. Ivins downloaded and
printed off the Internet on March 10, 2005, but I learned that on April
18, 2002, official
testing found Ames anthrax
spores "outside containment, including Dr. Ivins' office and near a
passbox." Also "in a men's
change room."

Dr. Ivins' concerned officemate was female, yet spores were found in a men's change
room. There's no mention on any spores found in the women's change room. The
article suggests the unauthorized
cleanups were all related to some mishandling of the anthrax letters after the
mailings and after
they were brought to Ft. Detrick to be examined. But, was
it? There would be no way to know for certain, since - before or
after - they are still spores from the mailing.

It wasn't what I was looking for, but it's still very
interesting. There's been a lot written about how the
culprit
couldn't have prepared the anthrax letters without contaminating
himself and areas where he worked. It appears that Dr. Ivins did exactly that. But no one put 2 and 2 together in
December of 2001 or April of 2002. The investigation was
focused upon Central New Jersey during that time.

Ivins undoubtedly knew enough to use a biosafety cabinet to put the
powdered anthrax into the letters and to seal the letters. The
completed anthrax letters would then have been placed in some kind of
container,
like a Baggie, and the outside of the Baggie would have been thoroughly
cleaned with bleach before taking it out of the biosafety
cabinet. But, taking the powder to the biosafety cabinet
and opening the biosafety cabinet after completing the loading and
sealing of the letters were still periods of potential contamination -
even with negative air pressure in the cabinet. And, then there's
damp object used to wet the flap on the envelope and the roll of tape
used to seal
the backs of the letters. Was there time to thoroughly sterilize
them before taking them out
of the
biosafety cabinet?
It appears that Dr. Ivins not only failed to realize that spores could
escape and aerosolize from a sealed envelope, they could also escape
from lab
equipment that wasn't designed to handle aerosolized dry spores.
Changing clothes and showering might not have eliminated all the Ames
spores on or around him, but it would be enough to make the few
remaining spores extremely hard to find. The next time the attack
anthrax would have the potential to cause detectable contamination
wouldn't be in his home or car. It would be when he opened the
Baggie to dump the letters into the mailbox across from Princeton
University in New Jersey (and near the KKG sorority facility).
And that mailbox was
thoroughly contaminated with anthrax spores.

No matter where you look, the evidence always leads to Dr.
Ivins, never
away from Dr. Ivins.

And, by the way, there's something else
they found in that black
briefcase belonging to Dr. Ivins:

Item 21: A
bag
with fake
hair pieces such as sideburns, and a mustache; glue, puddy wax, bruise
kit,
fake blood, makeup, powder and a brush.

It probably doesn't mean
that
Ivins used a disguise when he
drove to Princeton to mail the letters. But, it seems to be more
evidence that points to
Dr. Ivins and not
away from Dr. Ivins.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, March 14,
2010, thru Saturday, March 20, 2010
March 20, 2010 - Keeping up its
practice of distorting the facts related to the Amerithrax
investigation, the Frederick News-Post today has an article titled "Administration
rejects call to further probe Amerithrax." The article
begins with this:

President Barack Obama's
administration is threatening to veto Congress' intelligence spending
bill for this fiscal year, and further investigation of the anthrax
mailings could be halted as a result.

Just like Bloomberg/Businessweek,
they try to make it seem like the potential veto is all about
preventing congressional hearings on the Amerithrax
investigation. You have to read carefully to find out that it is
NOT:

On March 15, Office of
Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag sent a letter to four
congressional leaders, saying their versions of the budget bill "still
contain several provisions of serious concern to the intelligence
community."

Orszag said three of the
issues -- the anthrax
investigation was not one of
them -- are so serious they would advise Obama to veto the
entire bill if Congress does not fix them.

I don't mind the media
calling for a congressional probe into the Amerithrax investigation, I
just wish they wouldn't be so sleazy and deceptive in the way they do
it.
March 19, 2010 - There's a new
article in Science Magazine titled "Silicon
Mystery Endures in Solved Anthrax Case." I've managed to
scrounge up a copy. It begins this way:

What about the silicon?
That question has confounded investigators throughout the probe into the 2001 anthrax letter attacks, which the U.S.
government formally concluded
in February. Scientists inside and outside
the government saythere is clear
evidence that the high levels of silicon found in the
anthrax came not from anything added to
“weaponize” the anthrax spores—as
researchers had suggested early in the probe—but from
the culture in which the spores were grown. That evidence
may have settled the issue
of whether the anthrax wasweaponized, at least for scientists
familiar with the case. But
it raises a different question: Why did the mailed anthrax have such a
high proportion of
spores with a silicon signature in comparison to most other anthrax
samples?
The answer, according to academic scientists who helped with the case, probably would not change the FBI’s conclusion that the attacks were the sole handiwork of now-deceased U.S. Army researcher Bruce Ivins. But it could help illuminate exactly how the attack material was prepared. Resolving the mystery might also pave
the way for new techniques using trace elements in a bioterrorism agent
to link it to its source.

In the article, Science
Magazine finally acknowledges the key fact that only a percentage
of the attack spores contained silicon in their spore coats. That
percentage may relate to how
much silicon is in the growth medium. The article concludes with
a suggestion from a Japanese scientist that every brand of growth
medium be tested to see how it affects the amount of silicon that will
show up inside the spore coats. It could lead to a good forensic
finding.

The Japanese scientist and the author of the Science article seem to be
unaware of the fact that Lawrence Livermore Laboratories did some tests
where only the amount of
silicon in the growth medium was altered, and the results didn't show
any change in the amount of silicon in the spore coats. That
suggests to me that there may be one or more other factors involved - such as
temperature, viscosity,
timing, the sporulation medium or some ingredient that might be
contrary to standard lab procedures, but
which an expert might use when creating spores in secret and in a hurry.

As one would
expect, because the various
conspiracy theory web sites cannot find any support in the Science
article for their bizarre
beliefs, they either ridicule the article or simply ignore it.
March 18, 2010 (B) - Hmmm. I
don't know what it means, but in the
FBI's pdf document #847447 there is a list of papers found in a
black briefcase which FBI agents took from Dr. Ivins' home during the
November 1-2, 2007 search. And there are copies of some of the
papers. Included (starting on page 132 of that pdf file) is
a stack of computer printouts from the Internet which Ivins made on May 10, 2005, all related to the validity of
handwriting analysis in court.

Checking back through my files to see what was happening in the anthrax
investigation around that time frame, the only thing of significance I
can find is that, on May 1, 2005, Debora
MacKenzie of New Scientist Magazine wrote the first review of my book.
That makes me wonder if Dr. Ivins read the review and bought a
copy. Or the review may have prompted him to look at my main
web page from that time. From there, he could have clicked on
the image of my book and looked Amazon.com's information about my
book. Then as now, he would have found a customer review that
said:

Ed's suggestion that a child wrote the letters (because block letters
were used) has always been especially silly. It is not difficult for an
adult to disguise his writing (using block letters). There would be no
reason to involve a child.

But, I realize this
is probably just a good example of looking at
everything from my own personal point of view.

On the other hand, I still have my web site logs for that period.
I wonder what they show for the period May 1 - 10, 2005. I'll
take a look-see and let you know. It'll probably take a few days
to go through the logs.

March 18, 2010 (A) - One of the
conspiracy theory web sites located the letter
from Peter R. Orszag at the Office of Management and Budget which Bloomberg/Businessweek
claimed indicated that "President Barak Obama would probably veto
legislation authorizing the next budget for U.S. intelligence agencies if
it calls for a new investigation into the 2010 anthrax attacks." The cover letter lists the three
areas which could result in a veto by from the President, and any new
investigation of the anthrax attacks would clearly not be
in any of those three areas. Here's what the attachment to the
letter actually says about
the proposed bill to reinvestigate the anthrax attacks of 2001:

INTELLIGENCE
COMMUNITY INSPECTOR GENERAL
REVIEW OF INTELLIGENCE TO DETERMINE IF FOREIGN CONNECTIONS TO ANTHRAX
EXISTS (Section 505 of the House bill):This
provision, which authorizes the IC IG to conduct an investigation to
determine if there
was a foreign connection to the anthrax attacks of 2001, is duplicative,
and the Administration is
greatly concerned about the appearance and precedent involved when Congress commissions an agency Inspector
General to replicate a criminal investigation. The anthrax investigation was one of the
most thorough ever undertaken by the FBI. The case involved more than 10,000 witness
interviews, more than 5,000 grand jury subpoenas, and collection of more than
5,000 samples from 60 site locations. The FBI vigorously
examined the potential for a foreign connection with the attacks.It coordinated its
investigation with various members of the United States Intelligence Community, as well
as with various foreign governments. The investigation was conducted both
within the United States as well as overseas. The FBI conducted searches, gathered
potential evidence, and conducted interviews, the results of which did not
support the existence of a foreign connection with the attacks.
On February 19, 2010, the investigation
was closed. As a result of these efforts, the FBI is confident that the
attacks were
planned and committed by Dr. Bruce Ivins, acting alone. The commencement of a fresh investigation
would undermine public confidence in the criminal investigation and unfairly cast
doubt on its conclusions.

So, the letter had nothing to do with Rep. Rush Holt's bill calling for
a congressional hearing into
the investigation of the anthrax attacks. It is ONLY about Holt's
other bill to ask
the Intelligence Community Inspector General to "determine if there was
a foreign connection to
the anthrax attacks of 2001." Such an investigation would be
"duplicative," since the FBI already investigated that possibility in
every conceivable way and found that there was no foreign connection.

I find it interesting that Bloomberg/Businessweek's totally
misleading article is still available, and the
correction is also
available. Evidently, Bloomberg wants the conspiracy theorists to
continue to have nonsense to support their beliefs while at the same
time providing the people interested in actual facts with what they need.

March 17, 2010 - There's an extremely interesting 55 minute
interview with Dr. Meryl Nass in .mp3 format available by clicking HERE.
She spends a lot of time in the first half hour talking about Dr.
Steven Hatfill. When asked about Dr. Ivins, she responds at the
30 minute mark, "I don't know why
they started to focus more on Ivins." That should have
been the title of the show. Dr. Nass's ignorance of the case
against Ivins was astounding.
But that didn't stop her from ridiculing the case.

The interview
took place yesterday on
the "Expert
Witness"
radio program in New York City. The questioners were Michael
Levine and Mark
Marshall. Toward the end of the program, it seemed clear
that Levine and Marshall weren't buying all of Dr. Nass's conspiracy
theories, but she helped them to argue their own theory: Government
employees are generally incompetent and totally incapable of such
convoluted and intricate conspiracies.

March 16, 2010 (B) - Here's a
totally new question that seems worthy of discussion: Why did Dr. Ivins take the Fifth when
an FBI agent mentioned a specific
name to him on November 1, 2007? I've created
a new supplemental page titled "Dr. Ivins
Takes The Fifth" which provides all the details I've been
able to find so far on the subject.

President Barack Obama probably would veto legislation
authorizing the next budget for U.S. intelligence agencies if it calls for a new investigation
into the 2001 anthrax attacks, an administration official said.

A proposed
probe by the intelligence agencies’ inspector general “would undermine
public confidence” in an FBI probe of the attacks “and unfairly cast
doubt on its conclusions,” Peter Orszag, director of the Office of
Management and Budget, wrote in a letter to leaders of the House and
Senate Intelligence committees.

The conspiracy theory web
sites are jumping all over this, and it's easy to understand why.
To them, it's proof of a cover-up or a massive conspiracy of some
kind. I suspect, however, that the Obama administration isn't
concerned about the conspiracy theorists, they're concerned about
turning the Amerithrax investigation into some kind of political
football which will provide the world with lessons on how to easily
make biological weapons in any microbiology lab.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. It also
wouldn't surprise me if the Bloomberg/Businessweek story doesn't turn
out to be a
major distortion of the facts in some way. Bloomberg seems to be the only news organization that even
mentions the anthrax attacks as part of this story. The
Washington Post doesn't mention it. Salon.com
didn't until they added an update. All the blog articles I
see seem to use the Bloomberg/BusinessWeek article as their starting
point.

UPDATE NOTE:
Sometime later, Bloomberg/Businessweek
totally revised the article, removing the absurd first two
paragraphs and only mentioning the anthrax attacks near the end of the
revision. Here's what is now reported about the anthrax attack
investigation:

While not prompting a veto, a provision calling for a
new investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks also is objectionable,
Orszag said.

Undermine
Confidence

A proposed
probe by the intelligence agencies’ inspector general “would undermine
public confidence” in a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe of the
attacks “and unfairly cast doubt on its conclusions,” Orszag wrote.

On Feb. 19,
the Obama administration released a 92-page summary of the FBI probe
that said the late Bruce Ivins, a government scientist, was behind the
attacks. Lawmakers including Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey
Democrat, have questioned the thoroughness of the investigation.

That's a big difference
from what was first reported. But, I seriously doubt that it will
change much of anything on the various conspiracy theorist's
blogs. However, it's interesting that Bloomberg has both versions on its site.

March 15, 2010 - Once in awhile,
conspiracy theorists actually come up with some good information.
The information never proves any kind of government conspiracy, of
course, but it sometimes it answers other questions.
This morning on Lew Weinstein's web site, "Anonymous
Scientist" seems to have answered the question of why the FBI/DOJ
removed pages 70-77 from pdf
file #847551 in their list of supplementary materials.

Pages 70-77 of 847551.pdf
reproduce an Interview with Dr. Bruce Ivins. The interview begins with
the following statements:

BRUCE EDWARDS IVINS, W/M.
DOB: 04/22/46, SSAN 280-44-544-, [REDACTED] was advised of the
identities of the interviewing agents and the purpose of the interview.
Also present for the interview were Ivins’ attorneys, [REDACTED] and
[REDACTED], and AUSAs [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] AUSA [REDACTED]
provoded a letter to Ivins and his attorneys detailing the nature of
the “off the
record” interview…

Footnote 1, Page 5 of The
Amerithrax Investigative Summary states:

Information derived from
sources such as the federal grand jury investigation, sealed court
orders, and an “off-the-record”
interview of Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, while contributing to the overall
investigation, is omitted from this Investigative Summary.

Oops. It was an "off the record"
interview that was somehow made part of the record.

March
14, 2010 (B) - This morning I uploaded a new supplemental page
titled "The Errors That Snared Dr. Ivins."
The new page describes in detail two errors Dr. Ivins made which turned
an impossible case into a solid case for the FBI. The first error
was believing what was commonly
believed, instead of checking things out. The second error
was an elementary error in microbiology: Ivins believed his methods
eliminated mutations that weren't really eliminated at all.

Some of the material on this new page was written as part of my
comment on March 8. By converting that comment into a
supplemental page, I created an improved ability to link to the
information when the need arises. Also, comments tend to
get buried by new comments and then forgotten. Supplemental pages
remain as key places for information.March
14, 2010 (A) - I keep getting the
impression that Dr. Ivins was thinking about sending out the media
letters before
9/11. The horrific events of 9/11 apparently just convinced
him to actually do it.

Here are the reasons I've developed that impression:

1. The date on the media letters seems to be an
after-thought. It doesn't appear to have been written by the same
person or with the same pen. The writer of the date used a
lighter touch than the writer of the rest of the letter.

2. During the time between the writing of the letter and the
addressing of the envelopes, the writer of the letter learned how to
properly draw the letter R. Learning can take moments, but
the situation indicates there was a bigger time gap involved.
3. The "hidden message" in the
letters doesn't seem to be
something someone would conjure up quickly. It seems to be
something that the anthrax mailer thought about for a long time before actually preparing
the media letters.

5. The Bacillus subtilis
contamination found in the media letters suggests that it was some kind
of test sample that could not be used for normal work because of the
contamination. Dr. Ivins may have kept it for weeks instead of destroying it, as
he contemplated the idea of sending a crude form of anthrax in the
threat letters to the media.

6. The anthrax mailings were a premeditated
act. Premeditation of any
major crime isn't something that typically happens in a few hours or
even a few days. Reasons have to accumulate. The act has to
be justified by many hours of intense thought. All the possible
ways of getting caught have to be thought through and eliminated.

7. Dr. Ivins was very
methodical. He planned things that others would do without
thinking. He did trial runs on trips. He wrote procedures for things that others
would just do spontaneously.

8. The records of samples taken
from flask RMR-1029 do not show
any samples being extracted immediately following
9/11. While it cannot be expected that someone committing a crime
would log taking the spores
during that time frame and leave evidence of his crime, it would be
interesting to know more about the samples taken on July 9th and
August
27th. Did any growths show contamination and have to be
destroyed?

I'd certainly be interesting in anything that disproves or helps prove
this "impression," which now seems more like a "working hypothesis."

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, March 7,
2010, thru Saturday, March 13, 2010
March 13, 2010 - Uh oh. I was
hunting for documents to use in a new supplemental page when I happened
to notice that one of the FBI's .pdf files containing the 2,700 pages
of supporting data has been modified.
Pdf
file #847551 previously consisted of 180 pages. Now it
consists of 172 pages. And the missing 8 pages are some of the
pages I was using for my new supplemental page. Pages 70 - 77 of
the copy I downloaded and saved on February 19, 2010, are not in the
current version. They contain a description of an FBI interview
with Dr. Ivins on June 13, 2008.

I wonder why the pages were removed. They probably contain
something that should have been redacted.

March 12, 2010 - Today, arguments on
Lew
Weinstein's and Dr.
Meryl Nass's web sites brought to light some very interesting questions:
If it requires the work of multiple
people and weeks of intense
labor and lab time to make anthrax powders like those found in the
Leahy and Daschle anthrax letters, as conspiracy theorists claim, why
didn't Dr. Ivins ever use that argument in his own defense?
Why, instead, did he claim in multiple emails that others at Ft. Detrick - who had less knowledge about making spores
than he - could easily have done it?

Just weeks before
government scientist Bruce Ivins' suicide, a grand jury was convening
on the third floor of the federal courthouse, near the U.S. Capitol,
looking into the 2001 anthrax murders. Things weren't looking good for Ivins,
the only suspect in the case.

It was July 2008. His attorney,
Paul F. Kemp, according to court documents reviewed by AOL News, had
just filed court papers to become a
death-penalty-certified attorney in
the case -- a little-known fact. And the chief U.S. District
judge in Washington, Royce C. Lamberth, had approved the request.

So, Dr. Ivins' lawyer not only believed that Dr. Ivins would be
indicted, but he also believed it would be a death penalty case.

In response to the assertions that the case against Ivins was entirely
circumstantial, the AOL article contains a few words about the other
side of that argument:

"Suggestions that this is an entirely
circumstantial case are not accurate," said Dean Boyd, a Justice
Department spokesman. "We are confident Dr. Ivins acted alone in
carrying out this attack. There is the direct physical evidence. The
murder weapon was created by Dr. Ivins and solely maintained by Dr.
Ivins."

The article also mentions that "the government" contacted Mr. Kemp in
the weeks before Ivins' suicide to advise him that they were concerned
about Dr. Ivins' state of mind and well-being. In other words,
they were worried that Dr. Ivins might commit suicide.

Mr. Kemp still worries about this. The AOL article says he
wonders if he
couldn't have "conveyed
the prospect of a death-penalty case to Ivins more gently."

"I question myself. Maybe I
was too strong," he said. "I second-guess a lot the wording I used."

According to the conspiracy theorists and True Believers, however, Dr.
Ivins' suicide was entirely
the fault of "the government." In fact, many of them seem to
believe it wasn't a suicide at all. They believe "the government"
murdered
Dr. Ivins. Ooo. And the fact that they had warned his
lawyer was
just part of the government's evil
plot. Ooo. Somehow, it was the responsibility of
"the government" to prevent
Dr. Ivins from committing suicide.
But, they didn't do it. Tsk tsk tsk.

To be fair, there are a few True Believers who do not believe
that "the government"
murdered Dr. Ivins. They believe that Dr. Ivins did actually commit suicide.
They just think he committed suicide because he was afraid the trial
would expose him as a "cross-dresser," not because he was guilty of
murdering five people. Somehow, they believe that makes more
sense.

March 8, 2010 - One thing I find
very fascinating in discussions of the Amerithrax investigation is that
it's very difficult for some people to separate what is known now from what was known in October of 2001.
The answer to a key question requires understanding the
difference. Here's the question and the answer:

Question:
Why would Dr. Ivins use an anthrax strain that could be traced directly
back to his lab?

Answer: He
didn't. He used an anthrax strain that he believed could never be traced to his lab.

Ivins would never have
chosen his most famous anthrax, from which many people had received
samples (i.e., there was plenty of evidence linking him to the flask)
if he were a perpetrator who liked to fool people.

I tried to explain that at the time
he sent the anthrax letters, Dr. Ivins believed that he had obtained
the Ames strain from the USDA in Ames, Iowa, and he believed it was a common strain
used by labs all over the world. Dr. Nass didn't believe it, then
tried to change the
argument, but, when I persisted, Dr. Nass stopped allowing my posts to
be placed on her web site.

Meanwhile, someone posting to her site suggested that I claimed to "have acquired the supernatural ability of
channeling the late Dr. Ivin's thoughts" because I knew what he
believed in the latter half of 2001. I knew it because Dr. Ivins stated his beliefs in an email, not
because I could channel his thoughts. A few days ago, on March 3,
I wrote about how, when asked about the Ames strain on October 18,
2001, Ivins responded via an email:

I’ve
read that the strain was
originally isolated in the 1950s at Iowa State University, but we were
not given that information when we got the strain. I have also
read that the strain is very common in veterinary labs, clinical labs,
university bacteriology labs and research institutes all over the
country, and that doesn't surprise me. From the literature, it seems
that many places have the “Ames” strain or its derivatives. The
proper place to find out the
details of the strain is the USDA, not us. They sent it to us. It’s
their strain, and it's their responsibility to know the details about
it. Thanks!

Later, again on Dr. Nass's site, someone else made the same argument as
Dr. Nass, just phrasing it differently:

4) And if you were trying
to cast suspicions on another research facility you would certainly use
anthrax CRIMINALLY from that very institution, not your own
institution, your own lab.

I tried to respond, but Dr. Nass would not allow my response to be
posted. Since, I consider the thinking of the time of the anthrax
mailings to be an extremely important point, I'm going to describe the
situation here. It requires no channeling of anyone's
thoughts.
It's just what the facts clearly say.

When it was learned that Bob Stevens had been infected by the Ames
strain, investigators immediately began search for the sources of the
Ames strain. It was known that Ft. Detrick used it, but everyone at
Ft. Detrick and everywhere
else believed that the strain was a common strain that Ft. Detrick had
obtained from the USDA in Iowa.

CNN
reported Wednesday morning
that the anthrax virus that killed a Lantana man and was found in his
Boca
Raton office appears to be manmade and apparently produced in an American
lab about 50 years ago.

The television
network reported
that the anthrax that was found in a newspaper office in Boca appears
to
have been made in a lab in Iowa,
one of only two in the United States,
that made the deadly disease for research purposes.

The report also said
the anthrax
used in south Palm Beach County was probably manufactured sometime in the
1950s.

Paul Keim at Northern Arizona State
University had determined that Bob Stevens was killed by the Ames
Strain. The information got to the media, and investigators of
all kinds were sent to
Ames, Iowa, to find whatever records might be available to show how the
strain was distributed from there.

When
the questions began, the
collection was taken out of the drawer where it had been stored.

It
was examined in a biological
safety cabinet by two members of the ISU environmental health and
safety
unit. Although some labels were incomplete or cryptic, none of the more
than 100 tubes were labeled "Ames Strain."

In a 1985 publication, U.S. Army
Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases referred to the
strain,
now known to be from Texas, as the Ames Strain. The report also
referred
to the strain as being isolated in 1980, another reason Roth had doubts
about the Iowa connection.

"It
says it came from a cow in
1980. No one here remembers a case of anthrax in 1980, but we do
remember
a case in 1979," he said.

Office
of Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said yesterday that the
bacterial spores that caused anthrax outbreaks in Florida, New York and
Washington belong to the so-called Ames strain -- a subtype of the
anthrax bacterium that is commonly
used in universities around the world and was a focus of studies
by the U.S. military.

And

That strain was first isolated in Ames, Iowa, and sent in
1980 to Army researchers, who have since distributed it to various
academic laboratories.

The strain has spread by other routes to countless research labs around the
world, making its identification relatively useless as a tool for
tracking the perpetrators, experts have said.

Federal investigators have
found in recent weeks that the so-called Ames strain was first
identified not in Ames, Iowa, its reputed home, but a thousand miles
south, in Texas. The strain of the bacteria was found on a dead cow
near the Mexican border in 1981, and the geographic gaffe was the result of
a clerical error by a scientific researcher.

In late 1980, Gregory B.
Knudson, a biologist working at the Army's biodefense laboratory at
Fort Detrick, Md., was searching for new anthrax strains to use in
tests of the military's vaccine. In December 1980, he wrote Texas
A&M to see if they had any new anthrax strains. They didn't
have anything at the time, but in early 1981, they received a sample of
anthrax that had been extracted from a cow that had recently died, so
Texas A&M forwarded a portion of that sample to Ft. Detrick.

However, because Texas
A&M frequently sent such samples to the USDA in Iowa, they had postage-paid labels from the
USDA and they used one of the
USDA labels, simply pasting the Ft. Detrick address over the USDA
address. It was a
way of saving a few dollars for Texas A&M. And,
when the sample arrived at Ft. Detrick, Dr. Knudson called it "The Ames
Strain" because the mailing label
indicated the sample had come from Ames, Iowa. Click HERE to view the label.
It was a simple mistake that misled Dr. Ivins and everyone else into
thinking that the Ames strain came from Iowa.

Dr. Ivins believed what the news media and everyone else believed: The
Ames strain was a common strain
used by "countless labs around the world, making its identification
relatively useless as a tool for tracking the perpetrators."

That's why he used the
Ames strain in the anthrax letters. What other strain
available to him would have been better? He believed no other strain was as
widely distributed. And other strains might somehow be tracked
back
to Dr. Ivins. But the Ames strain wouldn't be tracked back to him
because Dr. Ivins believed
that his samples were virtually identical to what was stored at the
USDA in Iowa and distributed by the USDA to labs all over the
world.

It wasn't true. But Dr. Ivins didn't know that. And there's
no
need for me to have any ability to read Dr. Ivins' mind. The
facts say it's what everyone
thought at that time.

Most of this has been known for a long time, but the conspiracy
theorists and True Believers use beliefs instead of facts, so it may be
new to them. That's why I've laid it all out in detail.

There are solid facts
available which can totally demolish all
of the conspiracy theories
and all the beliefs of True
Believers, but it can be extremely
difficult to get them to look at the facts when they just close their
eyes, ears and minds to the facts and endlessly insist
on using
their own beliefs instead. Plus, they always seem to disappear
into the woodwork when you try
to pin them down on anything.March
7, 2010 - I sincerely hope that Rush
Holt gets his way and there's a congressional hearing into the
Amerithrax investigation. Maybe it will show the world how
conspiracy theorists - and people in the media who believe the
conspiracy theorists - can mislead large numbers of people into
believing things that are beyond
preposterous.

In one
discussion last week, I argued for awhile with someone who believed
that there was no Florida anthrax letter!
He explained to me:

There was no anthrax letter in Florida.
The 9/11 terrorists there paid their rent in cash...anthrax is easily transmitted in cash...and
they rented an apartment from someone connected to the Florida building.

I recited fact after fact,
giving him proof that one of
the anthrax letters mailed to the media in September 2001 was indeed
sent to the National Enquirer
in Florida. But he simply ignored the facts.

In another
discussion, this time with Dr. Meryl Nass, she demonstrated a
lack of knowledge and understanding of the details of the anthrax case,
yet that doesn't stop her from arguing that the FBI is wrong and there
must be some kind of vast government conspiracy to point the blame at
poor Dr. Ivins.

That's one reason I'd like to see congressional hearings. They
might ask some conspiracy theorists and True Believers to
testify. It would be very interesting to have
them state their bizarre beliefs on live TV for all the world to
see.
And it would be doubly interesting to show the world how each one of
them has his or her own set of
beliefs. They claim to know many who feel as they
do, and they crow every time they manage to find another conspiracy
theorist with a published opinion, but
in reality the only thing they all agree about is that the government
must be wrong.

Moreover, just like those who believe the moon landings were a big
government hoax, the conspiracy theorists and True Believers distort
and ignore facts about the anthrax attacks of 2001, and they believe
things which are totally and
demonstrably false.

The continuing preposterous
arguments about the attack spores being "weaponized" in some
supersophisticated way would be just the beginning.

There's also other basic
information that needs to be made clear. For example, Dr. Nass
couldn't understand why Ivins would have used a strain that would be
traced directly back to him and flask RMR-1029. Others have made
the same comment. They all appear to have been totally unaware
that at the time of the attacks,
Dr. Ivins believed that he
had created the spores in flask RMR-1029 from a sample obtained from
the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Ames, Iowa, and that the
Ames strain was a common
strain that the USDA had distributed for many years to laboratories all
around the globe. He believed
it came from a cow that had died in Iowa in the 1950's. He stated
so in an email dated October 18, 2001.

Dr. Ivins was mistaken.
The Ames strain didn't come from Iowa. It wasn't a common
strain. It had never been
at the USDA in Ames,
Iowa. It had been shipped directly from Texas to Ft.
Detrick. The strain was simply misnamed because of the way
a
mailing label was used.

He also believed that the
processes he and Dugway used to create the spores in flask RMR-1029
virtually prevented any
mutations from appearing in the results.

Dr. Ivins was mistaken.
Creating massive quantities of bacteria virtually guaranteed that there would be
numerous mutations in the bacteria.

He used seed bacteria from the sample he believed
came from the USDA, and he grew the bacteria in quick batches,
believing that
quick batches would prevent any mutations from having time to occur and
reproduce. But, in reality, if the odds of a mutation are one in
a billion, it doesn't make much difference to the number of mutations if you produce
100 quick batches of a trillion spores or 1 long-running batch of 100
trillion
spores. It just makes a difference to the quantity of each specific mutation. You'll get
a larger quantity of a specific
mutation if it is allowed to grow and reproduce for 100 days than if it
is allowed to grow and reproduce for only 1 day in one batch out of
100 batches. (Dr. Alibek patented a process that grew bacteria in
countless tiny microcapsules of growth medium, thus limiting the
quantity of a specific mutation to only that which could grow in a
single microcapsule.)

This can be all very
complicated
to someone who hasn't been studying it for eight years or more.
And it's even complicated to those like me who have been studying it for eight
years or more.

There's evidence, however, that only a very tiny fraction of the
American people continue to regularly wonder about the anthrax attacks
of
2001. Perhaps a few thousand out of three hundred and eight million.
The number of conspiracy theorists and True Believers who actually make
their opinions known is probably less than a fifty. They try to
include among their numbers the people (particularly politicians and
journalists) who
just want more information in
order to make a decision, but there's a BIG difference between those
people and the conspiracy theorists and True Believers who feel they
have all the information they need to make their decision that the
government is wrong.

There's a definite need for a congressional hearing that would be shown
on TV
for weeks , where the details of the Amerithrax investigation would be
laid
out and examined, and where all the nonsense and distorted facts from
the conspiracy
theorists and True Believers would be debunked point by point.

The conspiracy theorists and True Believers only have confusion on
their side. There is a cure
for confusion.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, February 28,
2010, thru Saturday, March 6, 2010
March 6, 2010 (B) - Dr. Meryl Nass
has also chosen to personally
attack Jean Duley, presumably in order to justify ignoring what
Duley said on
"Anderson Cooper 360." And, of course, Jean Duley is also part of
the Great
Conspiracy:

Whether the FBI used the
carrot or the stick to elicit a litany of Ivins' alleged confessed
crimes from the mouth of Duley, and to variously put her in front of
the TV cameras or hide her from the press, the fact remains she has
been the only person to publicly allege Ivins tried to murder people
previously. None of Ivins' psychiatrists, nor any of Duley's
supervising mental health professionals, have said anything public
about the case or supported any of Duley's allegations.
...
She is merely a puppet in a
complex operation, who will no doubt fade into obscurity now that she's
"clinched" the FBI's case.

Evidently, everyone who disagrees with the
conspiracy theorists is a "puppet" being controlled by the FBI.

Many questions CNN asked,
Duley said she could not answer because of confidentiality, and offered
her insight only on what was made public in the case.

Confirming what I wrote yesterday, the article gives the reason why Ivins would often attempt to
manipulate people:

He was also fascinated with
codes and puzzles. "Just secrets, period. Anything to do with codes
and, you know, tricking people and figuring it out and trying to baffle
people and that kind of thing. You
know, he really felt he was morally superior to everyone else. And he
had a God complex. He did have a God complex."

The article also mentions Dr. Ivins' menacing phone calls after he
checked himself out of the mental hospital, and a few other details.

Jean Duley said what she
knows from his behavior, from the things he said to her and his mental
character, leaves her without a doubt that her client, Bruce Ivins, was
the man who plotted and mailed the anthrax that threw a nation into
panic. The FBI's case is closed; the suspect committed suicide before
any charges could be filed. We will never know Ivins' whole story,
because it died with him.

We may never know the "whole story," but
we certainly know enough to be certain beyond any reasonable doubt that Dr. Ivins was
the anthrax mailer. The conspiracy theorists and True Believers
are simply resorting to the last-ditch argument: Unless it can be
proven that is totally impossible
for Dr. Ivins to be innocent, then he was
innocent.

Any doubt at all, no
matter how preposterous, is "reasonable doubt" to conspiracy theorists
and True Believers.

March 5, 2010 - Last night's
interview of Dr. Ivins' addiction counselor, Jean Duley, on "Anderson
Cooper 360" was much shorter than I expected, barely over 5
minutes. But it contained enough to send the conspiracy theorists
and True Believers into a rage against her, attacking
her personally in order to justify ignoring what she said.

She talked of Ivins' fascination with codes and the pleasure he got
from tricking people. She also talked of his plans to murder his
co-workers, his fascinations with bondage, blindfolding and other
matters.
When asked about the anthrax murders by interviewer Joe Johns, "You
believe this is the guy?", her
reponse
was, "I know it's the
guy. I know it is."

If my own experiences are any gauge, she was probably interviewed for
2 hours to get the 2 minutes of what she said that they chose to
air. It may just be the result of the heavy editing, but she
seemed to suggest that Ivins sent the anthrax letters due to some
desire to manipulate people. My impression is that his attempts
to manipulate people were the result of feeling superior to them.
He felt he knew better than they did. He sent the anthrax letters
because he felt the American people and the media were too stupid to protect themselves
from a bioweapons attack by Muslim terrorists. So, he felt
justified in taking action to manipulate them into taking protective
measures. His general feeling of superiority caused him to attempt to manipulate
people.

They also mentioned that Jean Duley first met Dr. Ivins about six
months before his suicide. That means that the mental health care
professional who wanted Ivins locked up years earlier, before the
anthrax mailings, was someone else.

March 4, 2010 (A) - Surprise!
Surprise! Today's Frederick News-Post actually contains an
article that does not try to argue that Dr. Ivins was or may have been
innocent. The article is titled "Police:
Ivins not linked to other unsolved cases." It includes this:

Testifying at a July 24,
2008, hearing to request a peace order, Ivins' therapist, Jean Duley,
said Ivins had tried to kill several people in the past.

"As far back as the year
2000, (Ivins) has actually attempted to murder several other people
either through poisoning. ... When he feels ... that he has been
slighted or has had ... especially towards women ... he plots and
actually tries to carry out revenge killing ... ," Duley told the court.

It appears that after
Ivins was named as the anthrax mailer, the Frederick police department
received "several allegations" that Dr. Ivins might have been involved
in other crimes in the Frederick area. But none of the
allegations could be verified.

We don’t know why the FBI
jumped so quickly to the conclusion that the source of the material
used in the attacks could only have come from a domestic lab, in this
case, Ft. Dietrick.
We don’t know why they focused for so long, so intently, and so
mistakenly on Dr. Hatfill.
We don’t know whether the FBI’s assertions about Dr. Ivins’ activities
and behavior are accurate.
We don’t know if the FBI’s explanation for the presence of silica in
the anthrax spores is truly scientifically valid.
We don’t know whether scientists at other government and private labs
who assisted the FBI in the investigation actually concur with the
FBI’s investigative findings and conclusions.
We don’t know whether the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the
Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. Postal Service
have learned the right lessons from these attacks and have implemented
measures to prevent or mitigate future such bioterror attacks.

Holt appears to have the
support of Congressman
Jerrod Nadler of New York. Although some of the questions
above actually can be answered today, it would still be nice to see a
congressional hearing to help make things clear and final.March 3, 2010 - Today, I came across
an interesting email sent by Bruce Ivins to a co-worker on October 18,
2001. It's on page 76 of the FBI's summary report. It says:

The “Ames” strain
of Bacillus anthracis
was sent to us in the late 1980-early 1981 time frame from the United
States Department of Agriculture, Animal & Plant Health Inspection
Services, National Veterinary Services Laboratories, Ames, Iowa. We
were told it came from a dead cow. We were not told the specifics of
the strain, specifically where it was isolated, or when it was
isolated. Basically, we were told it was Bacillus anthracis that had
been isolated from a clinical veterinary case. I’ve read that the strain was
originally isolated in the 1950s at Iowa State University, but we were
not given that information when we got the strain. I have also
read that the strain is very common in veterinary labs, clinical labs,
university bacteriology labs and research institutes all over the
country, and that doesn't surprise me. From the literature, it seems
that many places have the “Ames” strain or its derivatives. The proper place to find out the
details of the strain is the USDA, not us. They sent it to us. It’s
their strain, and it's their responsibility to know the details about
it. Thanks!

This seems to answer all questions about why Dr. Ivins used the Ames
strain in the letters, which people NOW know had a very limited
distribution and was extremely rare. At the time of the mailings, Dr.
Ivins thought it was a common strain and that the USDA had distributed
it widely, making it "common in veterinary labs, clinical labs,
university microbiology labs and research institutes all over the
world." He thought there'd be no way it could be traced back to
him.

It wasn't until late January of
2002 that it
was realized that the Ames strain didn't come from the USDA in
Ames, Iowa. It came from Texas
and was shipped directly from Texas to Ft.
Detrick. This has all been known for some time, but it's
never been made so clear as Ivins' email makes it.

Also never well-publicized
until now is the FBI's assertion that there was a hidden message in the
anthrax letters.

The printed warnings
contained a series of bolded letters, which when assembled corresponded
to a type of codons. The FBI explained this was derived from Ivins'
fascination with puzzles and codes, in particular a scientific article
entitled The Linguistics of DNA and Doug Hofstader's 1979
book Gödel, Escher, Bach.

"It is difficult to summarize
what the book is about," the FBI writes with some understatement.
"However, the basic premise is that there are surface meanings... and
then there are meanings within mathematics, art and music that are
hidden."

Ivins tried to dispose of
this book, and the article on DNA linguistics, in his garbage.

The bureau had seized both
items. The executive summary argues that while the discussion is tough sledding,
it was germane to Ivins's guilt, yielding the idea that not only was
there a hidden message in the anthrax letters, but that the methods
were derived from Ivins's personal readings, a book and a paper he
tried to dispose of when he believed the FBI was on to him.

The
messages - and we leave it to you
to read the detailed method of it in the FBI's summary - delivered in
part of a 'genetic code' were an abbreviation of 'F--- New York' (one
of the anthrax mailings went to the New York Post, another to Tom Brokaw at NBC) and
'PAT,' the name of a colleague Ivins was obsessed with. Whether a jury could follow this argument
will never be answered.

Yes. That seems to be
the problem. It's complex. It requires careful
reading to understand. But, a jury would see it illustrated and carefully explained,
which would help a great deal. And, when understood, it's
undeniable,
concrete, solid proof
connecting Dr. Ivins directly to
the anthrax letters. That's why I wrote my new supplemental page about it.

The comments I'm getting
in my emails about the new supplemental page suggest that most people
do indeed understand the significance of this new information.
It's mind-boggling. It's "WOW!" information. It's the most important information
released since they announced that Dr. Ivins was the anthrax
mailer.

But conspiracy
theorists can still dismiss it as something that reads like fiction
from some Dan Brown novel. It may be like something Dan
Brown would devise, but this is real, it's solid and it's direct evidence.

I failed to mention that it was the main part of the report on NBC News
on Friday, February 19, where Brian Williams showed the code and
expressed amazement over that particular piece of solid, new
information. And it was mentioned in Scott
Shane's New York Times article on February 20.

So, it has been mentioned -
but only a few times. Most news articles about the closing of
the case seem to accept that Dr. Ivins was indeed the anthrax mailer,
although many would like to see some kind of congressional hearing to
review the case and all of its details. I would like to see a
congressional hearing, too, just to see some of the details explained on TV. It's fascinating
stuff. But it can be confusing. However, if it can be illustrated and explained
to a bunch of politicians in some hearing, which I think it
can, anyone should be able to understand it.

The Times writes about "a lack of direct evidence tying Dr. Ivins to
the letters." The
hidden code is direct evidence.
It ties Dr. Ivins and only
Dr. Ivins directly to
the anthrax letters.

I have just added to this web site a new
supplemental page describing in detail the new "smoking gun" evidence
which seems to prove beyond any
reasonable doubt that Dr. Bruce Ivins
was the anthrax mailer. In the new page, I try to explain the
evidence in a more accessible way, stepping through the evidence point
by point. The page is titled "The
Coded Message in the Media Letters." I've also added a link to the
Table of Contents for this site. And I added Fact 1.1 to the list
of facts in
The Case Against Dr. Ivins instead of re-numbering everything after
#1.

When this "smoking gun"
evidence connecting Ivins to the writing of the
letters is combined with Dr. Ivins control of "the murder weapon"
(i.e., flask RMR-1029) and the multiple times he attempted to mislead
the
investigation and destroy evidence, there really can be no reasonable
doubt about who sent the anthrax letters.

There is
one other thing I noticed in the summary that may be worth
mentioning. At
the top of page 42 is this information:

The
mental health information contained in this Investigative Summary
derives from the following sources of information: (1) interviews of
people close to Dr. Ivins; (2) interviews of Dr. Ivins himself; (3) a
review of thousands of e-mail messages by Dr. Ivins and about Dr.
Ivins; and (4) a review of his prescription records. 28 Of these, some of the most
detailed information regarding his deteriorating mental health in the
years leading up to the mailings came from the words of Dr. Ivins
himself, either in e-mails or in interviews with investigators.

And at the bottom of page 42 is this footnote (#28):

28
Recently, pursuant to court
order, Task Force agents obtained the mental health treatment records
from a number of mental health providers who treated Dr. Ivins over the
years, and interviewed a number of those providers. However, as that
information remains under seal, nothing in this Investigative Summary
is derived from those records.

This poses the question: Who was the "witness" with whom Dr. Ivins was
talking when he was recorded saying he couldn't remember sending the
anthrax letters and didn't want to be hypnotized to help
remember? I previously stated that it appeared to be a
psychologist or psychiatrist. That may still be true, but the
above quoted passages seem to clearly say that any discussions with he
own personal "mental health
care provider" would still be "under seal," possibly because of
doctor-patient confidentiality. Whether or not that would apply
to the psychologists and psychiatrists who talked with Dr. Ivins after
he had himself committed to a mental hospital shortly before his death
is unknown. They might be part of the "interviews of Dr. Ivins
himself." I think a meeting with a psychiatrist after committing
oneself to a mental hospital would be considered "an interview," rather
than any kind of treatment.

Notice also that the first word of the footnote is "Recently." That and the
"under seal" mention seem to confirm that there is a lot of information
about what Dr. Ivins said to his personal psychiatrist or psychologist
that is still confidential but to
which investigators gained access after
Dr. Ivins death.

If Dr. Ivins talked to hospital doctors about not remembering sending
the anthrax letters, it seems very likely he was a lot more clear and
specific when he talked with his own personal psychiatrist or
psychologist.

There may still be a "confession" somewhere to add to the overwhelming
evidence we already have.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, February 21,
2010, thru Saturday, February 27, 2010
February 27, 2010 - On Thursday, in an
on-line discussion, I was asked how I could state with certainty
that Dr. Ivins was the anthrax mailer when the subject is still under debate. I
responded,

There are also people who
dispute that the earth is round, but that doesn’t mean intelligent
people can’t state with absolute certainty that the evidence makes it
clear that the earth is NOT FLAT.

And, shortly afterward, someone sent me a link to a article from
Tuesday about The
Flat Earth Society. Here is a description of some of
the views of Daniel Shenton, the new president of The Flat Earth
Society:

"There is no unified flat
Earth model," Shenton suggests, "but the most commonly accepted one is
that it's more or less a disc, with a ring of something to hold in the
water. The height and substance of that, no one is absolutely sure, but
most people think it's mountains with snow and ice."

The Earth is flat, he argues,
because it appears flat. The sun and moon are spherical, but much
smaller than mainstream science says, and they rotate around a plane of
the Earth, because they appear to do so.
...

In fact, Shenton turns out to
have resolutely mainstream views on most issues. The 33-year-old
American, ­originally from Virginia but now living and working in
London, is happy with the work of Charles Darwin. He thinks the
evidence for man-made global warming is strong, and he dismisses
suggestions that his own government was involved with the 9/11
terrorist attacks.

He is mainstream on most
issues, but not all. For when Shenton rides his motorbike, he says it
is not gravity that pins him to the road, but the rapid upward motion
of a disc-shaped planet. Countries, according to him, spread across
this flat world as they appear to do on a map, with Antarctica as a
ring of mountains strung around the edge. And, yes, you can fall off.

That the FBI has engaged in cover-up in
its Amerithrax investigation is readily apparent. This memorandum
addresses the urgent matter of what it is that is being covered up.

He then begins citing totally incorrect information from newspaper and
magazine articles (and some books) dating back to the early days of the
anthrax investigation as proof
that everything that was later learned is really just a coverup.
And he supports that with his interpretations of things said in FBI/DOJ
briefings.

I would certainly like to see all the conspiracy theorists and True
Believers get together and sing their theme song, "I don't care what
the facts say, I'm going to believe what I want to believe."

February 26, 2010 - This morning,
The Baltimore sun has a brief article titled, "Bill
for more investigation of '01 anthrax case passes House."
But this doesn't appear to be the Bill to have a congressional hearing
about the case. Instead, it's an effort by a couple
Representatives who still think - in
spite of all the evidence - that foreigners somewhere were
behind the attacks. They "want the director of National Intelligence
to investigate potential foreign
connections to the attacks." The brains behind this bill
are Maryland Republican Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, who represents Frederick, and Democratic Rep. Rush Holt, from the
New Jersey district where the anthrax letters were mailed.

Holt said "many questions
remain" about the FBI's handling of the case, including whether a
foreign connection was "overlooked, ignored or not pursued."

Clearly, to these two politicians, no amount of evidence can be
convincing unless it is evidence that proves what they and/or their
constituents believe. It looks like an issue that can be cleared
up in a few hours, but the politicians could stretch it out for weeks
before coming to some non-conclusion.

February 25, 2010 - FWIW, I've had a
copy of "Godel, Escher, Bach" in my library for many many years.
It's the book which contains the method Dr. Ivins used to put a secret
message in the media letters. I just found my copy in the section
of my library related to computer crimes. I'd been looking
elsewhere for it - the science section, the psychology section, the
reference section, etc. A picture of my copy is HERE. It doesn't mean
anything. The bookmarks aren't in the part that interested
Ivins. But I find it very interesting that I would have a copy of
that particular book. And since my edition has the
coding method on page 404 just like what the FBI found, that
probably means it's the same edition.

But it also poses an interesting question: If Ivins' copy of the book
is evidence against him, why isn't my copy evidence against me?
The answer: Because having a copy of the book means nothing by
itself. It only means something when it is viewed together with
all the other circumstantial evidence
in the case.

February 24, 2010 (B) - The hidden
message in the media letters seems to be a virtual "smoking gun" pointing to
Dr. Ivins' guilt. But describing it can get really
complicated. I'm going to try to put together a supplemental page
explaining it in detail as best as I can, with lots of
illustrations. Until then, the FBI's description of the hidden
message in the media letters begins on page 58 of their
summary report. You can read the details there.

February 24, 2010 (A) - This
morning's
New York Times contains a "Letter From America," which seems to be a
letter from a NYT
columnist, Richard Bernstein. The letter is titled "Haste
Leaves Anthrax Case Unconcluded." Like the Edward Jay Epstein
letter to The Wall Street Journal (which this letter also cites as
evidence of some kind), Bernstein seems to be totally ignorant of what
is known about the attack
anthrax. And he also uses the same
prime source for his theory:

The point, as one scientist specializing in fine
particle chemistry told me, blows a large hole through the
92-page summary of the investigation released last week by the F.B.I.
and the Justice Department, the main conclusion of which is that Bruce
E. Ivins, a scientist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of
Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Maryland, was the anthrax
mailer.

“Note that the proprietary
azeotropic drying technique and the pneumatic mill are both
superspecialized pieces of equipment, neither of which is at Detrick,” the specialist in fine particles,
Stuart Jacobsen, said in an e-mail message.

The letter ends with this:

The point is not that Mr.
Ivins wasn’t the anthrax mailer. Perhaps he was. But some of the
F.B.I.’s arguments seem like conclusions in search of arguments, while
other aspects of the report — notably
its failure to deal with the silicon question — are
conspicuously incomplete.

The author of the letter appears to still believe that the spores in
the anthrax letters were "weaponized" with silica. It's another
instance of how bad information just gets repeated again and
again. As USA
Today recently said:

Whatever
history's verdict on Ivins, one brouhaha at the center of the case has
already outlived him — the story of "weaponized" anthrax.

And The New York Times
is helping to keep the absurd myth alive.

Unfortunately, no one knows of any way that solid scientific facts can
be distributed and read and understood by everyone in order to completely
destroy some totally idiotic myth that seemingly malicious people want
to keep alive. There's always someone who doesn't get the
message.

Conspiracy theorists, of course, jump on such uninformed opinions as
proof of their beliefs. Dr. Meryl Nass quotes
from the article at length on her web site. If there's any
doubt as to whether or not Dr. Meryl Nass is a conspiracy theorist,
just read this comment from another
one of her posts:

JFK, RFK, George Wallace,
Martin Luther King, all felled by lone nuts. Even Ronald Reagan's
would-be assassin was a lone nut. Now Bruce Ivins. The American public
is supposed to believe that all these crimes required no assistance and
no funds.

The totally irresponsible misinformation distributed about the anthrax
case by the media never seems to end.

February 23, 2010
(B) - Someone
just distributed a copy of the letter Dr. Ivins evidently sent to the
CDC after he learned that Bob Stevens had contracted inhalation
anthrax. Only the name of the recipient is redacted:

I just heard this evening (and read over internet news) that a case of
pulmonary anthrax may have been identified in Florida. Is this true, or is this just hysteria?
The only Florida strain of B. anthracis that I am
familiar with is V770, which is the parent of V770-NP1-R, the strain
used in production of the human anthrax vaccine. (I believe that V770
was originally isolated from a cow in Florida in the early 1950s.) The
article said that this person was an “Outdoorsman,” and had drunk water
from a creek in North Carolina. If
he really does have anthrax, could he have gotten it this way,
or did he get it by tromping around some dusty field area. (Has North
Carolina been dry this summer?) I know that in the wild in Africa,
animals are supposed to be able to get it from water holes by stirring
up spores and presumably ingesting and possibly inhaling them as an
aerosol. Could this have happened? What if an animal had died upstream
and the stream was contaminated? (Drinking from a stream or creek
without boiling or purifying the water first is an invitation to
intestinal disease or parasites, but have any other human anthrax cases
been documented from people drinking contaminated water?)

You called me several times in the recent past with regards to another
anthrax issue. If there’s anything I can help with here (if you or
coworkers are involved) please let me know. I don’t know if there’s
anything I can do, but I’m certainly willing to provide whatever
informational assistance I can. (I would have been less surprised if
the Florida man had been hunting deer in Texas, where there is
identifiable anthrax. I don’t recall North Carolina as having ideal
soil for preservation of anthrax spores or for anthrax cycling of
spore-vegetative cell-spore-vegetative cell etc., but I suppose there
could be areas of higher soil calcium and alkalinity.)

Anyway, please don’t hesitate to give me a call if there’s anything I
can do. We are currently testing the virulence (in immunized and
unimmunized guinea pigs) of B. anthracis strains from all over the
world, including China, and we’ve come up with some very interesting
differences in virulence among the strains.

Take care of yourself,

- Bruce

This appears to be the
email which the FBI summary views as evidence of Dr. Ivins' guilt,
since he asks if a person could have gotten inhalation anthrax from
drinking water out of a creek. Dr. Ivins would know that you
can't.

From my point of view, the more important element in this letter is
fact that Dr. Ivins is trying to confirm
that there has been a victim of inhalation anthrax in Florida.
He's trying to get information without really saying why he wants it.

February 23, 2010 (A) - I've been
waiting for The Frederick News-Post to write something that claims no
one in their town could have been responsible for the anthrax
attacks. An article in today's issue titled "FBI
report fails to end questions about Ivins' guilt" seems to be what
I was waiting for. It starts this way:

The FBI may have concluded
Fort Detrick scientist Bruce Ivins was responsible for the 2001 anthrax
attacks, but many others aren't convinced.

Scientists, Ivins' friends
and others maintain the report is too flawed to have held up in court
had Ivins been alive for a trial by jury.

Quotes from Ivins' friends
and his supervisors at USAMRIID (officials who should have watched
Ivins more carefully) make up nearly the entire article.
They don't believe the evidence. The officials don't believe that
Ivins could have made the attack powders while they were his supervisor
or co-worker.

Clearly they just aren't looking at the facts. How can any
microbiologist say that it would take "25 to 50 weeks to create the
attack anthrax spores" if they've ever seen the actual amount of powder
as pictured HERE?

They don't even see anything incriminating in the fact that Ivins
worked unusually long hours alone in his lab just
before the anthrax mailings. And they make preposterous claims:

"Bruce didn't have the
skill to make spore preps of that concentration," which were two orders
of magnitude more concentrated than the anthrax in Ivins' lab, Andrews
said. "He never ever could make a spore prep like the ones found in the
letters."

According to the FBI's
summary report (page 37):

Dr. Ivins seemed to try to
downplay his skill-set in ways that were wholly inconsistent with
reality. He repeatedly and adamantly denied that he could make spores
of this quality. [...] However, Dr. Ivins unwittingly
contradicted himself in his laboratory notebook, where he described the
RMR-1029 that he had created as: “RMR-1029: :99% refractile spores;
< 1% vegetative cells; < 1% non-refractile spores; : 1% debris.”
(Laboratory notebook 1040, page 074, Attachment F.) This is evidence
that he could, and did, create spores of the concentration and purity
of the mailed spores, which he described as “99% refractile with no
debris and some clumping” in a report dated March 12, 2002.

So, I guess it's just a matter of who you believe - people who were
somewhat responsible for allowing a major crime to be committed by
someone under their supervision or the FACTS which say that Ivins
actually could and did create
spores of the purity of those in the anthrax letters.
February 22, 2010 - This morning I
noticed an article from Saturday's
Frederick News-Post which ends with this tidbit of information
(highlighted in red):

Richard Schuler, an attorney
for the family of victim Robert Stevens, said the case looked
convincing. He said it does not change the status of a lawsuit the
Stevens family has filed in federal district court.

Stevens was a photo editor at
a Florida tabloid owned by American Media. His widow is suing the
federal government for damages.

Schuler said the
family has had the [FBI's summary] report since October. He said
the document bolsters their case showing a lack of security at Fort
Detrick and the inability to identify an employee with severe mental
health issues.

"Somebody should not have
allowed him to be in a position to handle these ultra-dangerous
organisms," Schuler said.

I suspect that they had an
earlier version of the summary report, but it's still interesting that
versions of the report have been circulating outside of the FBI &
DOJ for that long.

The family of Robert Stevens should have a good case. According
to The
Palm Beach Post, the Stevens case is expected to go to trial later
this year or early next year.
February 21, 2010 (B) - I just
noticed that Dr.
Meryl Nass has several editorials from 2008 on her web
site which called for an independent review of the Amerithrax
investigation. One editorial from The Washington Post is
titled "Anthrax
Suspicions - Why an independent look a the FBI probe is essential."
It can be summarized the same way I summarized the thoughts of
conspiracy theorists and True Believers in my (A) comment this morning: "We do not trust
the FBI."

The editorial says,

Even if the FBI got the
science right, it still must explain how and why it eliminated from
suspicion some 100 other people who had access to the vial.

Of course, the summary
report released on Friday explains exactly that. But, evidently,
Dr. Nass wants witnesses to name
names and wants politicians to dig deep into the personal lives
of other people at Ft. Detrick and elsewhere who might possibly have
commited the crime or helped Dr. Ivins.

While I don't like that reasoning, I certainly support a call for
an independent review of the case. I think it's a good idea to
show how the media totally ignores their
role in misleading the public about the case. An independent
review of the case would hopefully bring to light all of the conspiracy
theorists' actions and all of the media's incorrect
reporting and show the terrible damage they did.

If it weren't for the media - and the conspiracy theorists that fed the
media with nonsense, the anthrax case might have been
straight-forward and totally non-controversial -- although it probably
still would have taken seven or eight years to get the evidence needed
to nail the culprit.

Another thing I didn't mention in my (A) comment this morning but
probably should have. It's something else I noticed while
browsing: Near the top of page 70 in the FBI/DOJ's summary
report it says:

On June 5, 2008, Dr. Ivins
had a conversation with a witness,
during which he made a series of statements about the anthrax mailings
that could best be characterized as “non-denial denials”

Since pieces of the "conversation" are provided in word-for-word
format, the conversation was obviously recorded. And clearly the
"witness" wasn't just a casual acquaintance who happened to be wearing
a microphone connected to a recorder.

In the middle of page 70, Dr. Ivins states, "I do not have any
recollection of ever have doing anything like that." But we do
not know what the question was.

Dr. Ivins also states that he's "not a killer at heart" and "I tell you
I don't have it in my heart to kill anybody." But it was just a
month later that Dr. Ivins was telling his therapy group that he
planned to kill his co-workers at Ft. Detrick.

At the top of page 71, there's this very important sentence from the
writers of the summary:

The witness suggested that maybe Dr.
Ivins should get hypnotizedto
help him remember, to which he
replied that he would be terrified.

Note: Dr. Ivins does not want to be hypnotized to
find out what he really remembers.

The suggestion of
hypnotism very strongly suggests that the "witness" is most likely a
psychiatrist or psychologist who is able to perform the hypnotism and
to find out what Dr. Ivins really remembers. But we're missing
the exact words spoken, so that cannot be clarified. Moreover,
there's this sentence on page 8:

In the months that followed
the suicide of Dr. Ivins, investigators continued their review of
thousands of e-mails going back ten years, and examined additional
evidence that developed in the aftermath of his death. In addition, investigators sought and
obtained court orders authorizing access to his mental health records,
and interviews of various mental health providers who had treated Dr.
Ivins in the past.4

And footnote 4 at the bottom of the page says:

4. The results of
that record collection and
follow-up interviews remain under
seal at this time.

This also indicates that the "witness" is a psychiatrist or
psychologist and that the recording was done in a therapy session of some
kind. And some kind of "doctor/patient confidentiality" may still
be in effect by court order.

I haven't yet had the opportunity to go through the 2,700 pages of
supporting documents to see if more of this "discussion" with the
unidentified "witness" is available for study. I'll be very
surprised if it is.

But, I think it's important to know that Dr. Ivins claimed he could not
remember committing the anthrax attacks, but he didn't want to be
hypnotized so that he could
remember. He repeatedly states that he's not a killer at heart,
which seems to mean that the anthrax killings were not
intentional.

I don't know if any congressional hearings would bring out more details
about this "discussion," but it might. That's another reason why
I would totally support a call for such hearings.

February 21, 2010 (A) - In my inbox
this
morning, I found a couple messages from people wanting to draw my
attention to newspaper articles I hadn't yet seen or commented
upon. One article is in USA Today and it's titled, "Anthrax
myth persists despite evidence." It begins with these
questions:

Can science ever do away
with bad ideas? Or do they just limp along forever?

And this:

Whatever
history's verdict on Ivins, one brouhaha at the center of the case has
already outlived him — the story of "weaponized" anthrax.

"One of
my biggest frustrations with this has been showing people the data, and it doesn't
matter," says researcher Joseph Michael of Sandia National
Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M. Michael has presented electron
microscope results that show the 2001 attack anthrax wasn't weaponized
for two years, "but still the idea refuses to go away."

As
proof of that, we have this comment by Dr.
Meryl Nass made just yesterday:

But even
more important, the letter spores contained a Bacillus subtilis
contaminant, and silicon to
enhance dispersal. FBI has never found the Bacillus subtilis
strain at USAMRIID, and it has never acknowledged finding silicon
there, either. If the letters anthrax was made at USAMRIID, at least
small amounts of both would be there.

Nearly
everything in Dr. Nass's bizarre diatribe has been thoroughly debunked
in one way or another, yet she persists. But at some point
the idea that the attacks spores were "weaponized" with silica or
silicon has to be declared to be just
plain stupid.
I think that point is now passed. It's stupid, stupid, stupid.

And
some on the
Lunatic Fringe continue to believe that the attack spores came
directly from flask RMR-1029, even though that is totally untrue and
has been disproven in many ways. It doesn't even make any sense. I tried to explain the
facts about that to one scientist again and again, but she just
continued to believe what she wanted to believe.

The
other newspaper article people wanted to draw to my attention this
morning is an
opinion piece from November 10, 2001, which The New York Times has
reprinted because it hopes it "sheds light on current news or provides a window on the
past." While it begins with rehashing the thoroughly debunked
idea that the anthrax samples destroyed at Iowa State University had
some connection to the anthrax mailings, it then goes into an
interesting discussion of how cases are solved by plodding along and
collecting and examining the evidence until there's a break.
Sometimes it's luck, but often it's pure persistence that does
it. The Amerithrax case is a very good example of that.

I think all people who have arguments
against accepting the FBI's findings in the Amerithrax case can have
their arguments summarized into one 6-word sentence: "We do not trust
the FBI."

The evidence against Dr. Ivins is overwhelming. The 96-page
case summary is well written and leaves almost
no room for doubt -- unless you doubt everything because you do not
trust the FBI nor anyone who works with the FBI nor anyone who somehow
even agrees with the FBI.

Ignorance of the facts is another factor that causes people to believe
Dr. Ivins was innocent. But when that ignorance of the facts
is pointed out, the response will always be that "We do not trust the
FBI" and therefore no facts supplied by the FBI or anyone working with
the FBI can be trusted. So, why even bother studying the facts?

Conspiracy
theorists and True Believers endlessly fantasize about ways that a
sample from flask RMR-1029 could
have been stolen by some individual -- but why would they pick flask
RMR-1029? In hind-sight we all know that flask RMR-1029 was the
source for the "murder weapon." But
no one knew that before the attacks. RMR-1029 was just
another flask. The Ames strain was never used for a biological
weapon. It was only
used for testing vaccines. If someone wanted a sample of the Ames
strain, there were other places to get it. Flask RMR-1029 was a
container of Ames, but there were hundreds of other such
containers. If you recall, 1,070
samples of Ames were tested. They came from 15 different
labs. Only 8 of the 1,070 samples directly related to flask
RMR-1029. Why would anyone focus on RMR-1029 before the FBI
determined it was the source of the attacks?

Even Dr. Ivins' lab assistants didn't know what flask RMR-1029
contained or looked like. And there were hundreds of other flasks in the
same walk-in cold-room. Ivins' referred to it as the
"Dugway spores," and so did everyone else who knew about that
particular batch. But it didn't say "Dugway spores" on the flask.

The process of eliminating suspects began as soon as they determined
that Bob Stevens died from exposure to the Ames strain. That
immediately set the FBI and the Postal Inspection Service to work on
checking out everyone with access to the Ames strain. Narrowing
the search down to those with access to flask RMR-1029 or the other
samples grown from spores taken from flask RMR-1029 greatly reduced the
number of possible suspects.

There's no mystery about how suspects are eliminated. If
you live and work in Utah and worked regular hours around the time of
the mailings, it would be next to impossible to travel unnoticed to New
Jersey to mail the letters. If you're just an animal handler with
no knowledge of refining anthrax, you can be eliminated - particularly
if you never entered a lab alone. If you work on contract
projects where every minute of your time is billed to some customer,
it's very difficult to access a lab without billing someone and showing
proof of what you were doing. Many labs do not allow people to
work alone with pathogens, and many of those that do didn't have any
occasion where anyone worked alone for periods long enough to create
the attack anthrax. Records are kept. Work times are
recorded. Entry to key places is logged.

The conspiracy theorists and True Believers have fantasies about how it
can be done, but they have absolutely no
solid evidence to support their
fantasies. And they do not believe the mountain of solid evidence pointing to Dr.
Bruce Ivins. They do not trust that the FBI did a thorough
investigation because "a thorough investigation" can only result in
findings that agree with the beliefs of the conspiracy theorists and/or
True
Believers. If the findings do not agree, then the investigation
cannot have been "thorough."

At the top of this web site I list all the facts I knew about which
point to Dr. Bruce Ivins as being the lone culprit. The newly
released documents include some additional facts I did not know about
before Friday. The page numbers given below are the page numbers
from the summary, not from the .pdf file which starts the numbering
with the cover:

On
page 32:
Just before the times of the mailings, Dr. Ivins used the USAMRIID
library where a copy machine was
located. (The letters in
the envelopes were copies, not originals.) Visiting the library
was not a common thing for
him.

From
page
31: "Numerous microbiologists have concurred that two hours and 15 minutes would be
enough time to dry Ba spores,
depending on factors such as the quantity of starting material, the
volume of liquid in which it was suspended, and whether a centrifuge
was used to eliminate most of the water, leaving behind a pellet, or
paste, capable of being dried in well under two hours.

Also from
page 31: "Dr. Ivins’s own statements to investigators precluded
any possibility that his wife could have provided him an alibi. For
example, on February 18, 2008, Dr. Ivins stated that his wife never
knew where he was, nor did she ever question him about his nocturnal
wanderings."

On page 37:
Dr. Ivins could refine anthrax better than the experts at
Dugway. He criticised Dugway for their work in creating the
contents of RMR-1029 and even rejected one batch entirely because it
didn't meet his standards.

Dr. Ivins
repeatedly and adamantly denied that he could make
spores of the quality found in the Senate letters, yet he did exactly
that when he created 15% of the refined spores in flask RMR-1029.
He
could do it better than almost anyone else in the world.

From page
34: "There were only 14 people who had access to the hot
suites
where flask RMR-1029 was located in September and October of
2001."

On
page 38:
Dr. Ivins denied having any knowledge of how to dry
spores. Yet, he was the custodian
of the only freeze-dryer in his
building, he trained others on how
to use it, and he was the researcher who
actually placed the purchase order for the machine in the first
place. And,
around the time it was purchased, he took a two-day course on how to
use it. In his review of the course, he stated that it provided a
lot of practical knowledge.

As of this morning,
I've only managed to get to page 40 in my first read-through of the
case summary, but I did skip around in my first browse of the summary,
and there's one section that demands special attention:

On page 58:Ivins used a secret code in the first anthrax
letters.

The secret code in
the first anthrax letters was done by
drawing over A's and T's. That is something I would never have believed
before seeing the evidence. I thought it was just
"doodling." I also thought it could have been someone's
initials. Many people thought it had something to do with Atta,
one of the 9/11 hijackers. There was discussion of how A's and
T's were letters used in identifying sections of DNA, but no one could
make any solid sense of it.

My initial
impression was that the FBI's deciphering of the code seemed like
numerology -- manufacturing sense in something that really makes no
sense. But the solid facts began to nag at me. It was the
fact
that Ivins attempted to secretly throw away the book which contained a description of the coding
method that was the clincher for me. The FBI's supporting
documents include a
page from "Godel, Escher, Bach" which describes the coding method.

And, for me, on top of that "clincher" is a likely reason why Dr. Ivins probably put a
secret message into the media anthrax letters in the first place: He expected to be a hero as a result of sending the
letters. He didn't think anyone would be killed.
Like many
other scientists, he expected a real
biological weapons attack from Muslim extremists to follow the 9/11
attacks. By alerting the media and the nation to that possibility
with his
letters, he probably imagined that he would be saving tens of thousands
or even hundreds of thousands
of American lives. And knowing the hidden code would allow him to
prove that he sent
the
letters, even though he'd taken every other precaution he could think
of to prevent the letters from being traced back to him. (In
early 2001, I advised the FBI that I thought that keeping the originals
of the letters would help the culprit prove that he was the author, if
there was a need to prove himself to be "the hero who saved
America." I suggested he might keep them in his safe-deposit
box. However, I now see that a secret message in the media letter
would be safer than
using a safe-deposit box.)

If you accept that
the facts clearly say that Ivins used a secret code when writing the media
letters, that
is solid proof of Ivins' guilt. And the facts seem to
demand acceptance. Plus, there's new evidence that Ivins didn't
intend to kill anyone, and he hoped or expected to become a hero because
of what he'd done:

From page
12: "All envelopes were sealed with moisture activation of the
manufacturer adhesive and reinforced with strips of transparent tape,
both along the closure strip and the folds of the envelopes. Five to nine pieces of tape were
affixed to each of the four envelopes."

On page 33:
The day after the first letters were postmarked, Dr. Ivins
stated in an email that he exercised for the first time in months and
that he "felt good."

On page 9:
After the anthrax attacks had killed their first victim, Dr. Ivins sent
the CDC a "nonsensical"
explanation of how Bob Stevens could have contracted anthrax from a
natural source - by drinking contaminated water. You can't get
inhalation anthrax from drinking contaminated water. The spores must be inhaled. Dr. Ivins
knew that better than almost anyone else in the world. He was
evidently in a state of denial when he mailed the second batch of
letters.

There's still a lot
to read and study and think about in the
summary before even getting into the supporting documents. I'll
comment further as I come up with things worth commenting about.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, February 14,
2010, thru Saturday, February 20, 2010
February 20, 2010 - This morning,
there isn't as much in the news about the closing of the Amerithrax
investigation as I expected. The
Washington Post has an excellent review of the FBI's summary of the
case. Here are a few paragraphs:

The records offer substantial
support for the FBI's contention that biologist Bruce E. Ivins
single-handedly prepared and mailed deadly anthrax spores that killed
five people and terrorized a nation still reeling from the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

Drawing from the suspect's
e-mails and recorded conversations, the FBI
documents show an increasingly agitated Ivins seeking to implicate
colleagues while misleading investigators about his ability to make the
deadly powder used in the attacks.

In
a new disclosure, Justice officials
released a transcript of a
secretly taped conversation in which Ivins suggests that he might have
committed acts that he could no longer recall.

At the bottom of page 8
in the
case summary, it says that the information about those taped
conversations "remain under seal at this time." Those
conversations are something I would like to have seen a lot more
information about. I know some of the details, but I'm not the
right person to disclose them. I suspect many others also know
the details, and I hope one or more of them will reveal those details
before very long. The FBI and DOJ may have closed the case, but
there are a lot of people who are not in the DOJ or FBI who have
additional information about Ivins.

The Post article also
includes this:

"Arbitrarily closing the case
on a Friday afternoon should not mean the end of this investigation,"
said Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), whose district contained the mailbox
from which the anthrax letters were sent. "The evidence the FBI
produced would not, I think, stand up in court."

"There's absolutely no evidence he did anything," Kemp said. Rep. Rush
D. Holt, a Democrat from central New Jersey where the anthrax letters
were mailed, also was not satisfied.

"This has been a closed-minded, closed process from the beginning," he
said. "The evidence the FBI produced would not, I think, stand up in
court."

Another version of the
same article by Richard Serrano in The
Baltimore Sun expands upon Paul Kemp's comment:

Kemp scoffed at the FBI's
assertion that their investigation was "extraordinarily complex" and
turned on new "groundbreaking'' scientific evidence. "It was a big
screw-up," the lawyer said of the federal probe. "If they don't admit
that, then they are not facing reality."

Digging around, I see the Lunatic
Fringe is also dismissing the evidence, since it doesn't fit their
beliefs. And Dr.
Meryl Nass's web site has a totally bizarre, lengthy analysis of
the
situation that begins with this:

But FBI's report
was released on Friday afternoon... which means the FBI anticipated doubt
and ridicule. And the National Academy of Science (NAS) is
several months away from issuing its report on the microbial forensics,
suggesting a) asking
NAS to investigate the FBI's science was just a charade to placate
Congress, and/or b) NAS' investigation might be uncovering things the
FBI would prefer to bury, so FBI decided to preempt the NAS panel's
report.

That's a totally bizarre interpretation of what's
happening. Dr. Nass totally ignores the "c" option: c) the
science of the case was done by the
top people in the critical scientific fields, and the experts
contracted by the NAS are merely reviewing it make certain the science
is totally sound. It has nothing to do with the closing of the
case, which would only be affected by the NAS review if the NAS
happened to find some glaring error that all
the top scientists
failed to see.

Now, I'm going to take out my printed copy of the 96-page case summary,
a yellow highlighter, a red pen for making notes in the margins, and
I'm going to sit down and read it thoroughly. I'll have more
comments tomorrow.
February 19, 2010 (C) - After paging
through a tiny fraction of the documents that were released today, and
after reading various parts of the summary report, it's clear that it's
all going to take considerable time to digest.

The "confession" I'd hoped to see from Ivins turned out to be a
"non-denial." The recorded
statements by Ivins begin on page 70 of the summary. Scott Shane
in The
New York Times writes about it this way:

The report describes the
evidence against Dr. Ivins in far greater detail than before, revealing
his equivocal answers when
a friend asked him in a recorded conversation
whether he was the anthrax mailer.

“If I found out I was involved in some
way.” Dr. Ivins said. “I do not have any recollection of ever
doing anything like that,” he said, adding: “I can tell you, I am not a
killer at heart.”

Another recorded statement
by Dr. Ivins contains the same kind of "I don't remember" non-denial:

Bruce: “And I, and I do not have any recollection
of ever have doing anything like that. As a matter of fact, I don’t
have no clue how to, how to make a bio-weapon and I don’t want to know.”

There are details
about Dr. Ivins' expertise
which seem to prove conclusively that he knew how to make the attack
anthrax, even though he repeatedly tried to deny it. He brags
about the purity of the spores in flask RMR-1029, which he created and
which were the same or more pure than the powder in the Senate
letters. He was also the
expert on the lyophizer freeze-dryer. It's as his machine. He placed the
order for it and trained people how to use it.

There are also repeated
comments which seem to indicate that he didn't intend to hurt anyone.

There are new details about Dr. Ivins' practice of driving long
distances in the middle of the night and how he lied to his wife about
what he was doing.

There are details about his "obsession" with the college sorority which
seem to make it perfectly clear that the proximity of the mailbox in
Princeton to the sorority office was not
just a coincidence.

There are details about his attempts to shift the blame to a pair of
co-workers.

And there are countless details about Dr. Ivins' mental problems.

There's a section on how the FBI investigators eliminated other
suspects, but I haven't yet read it. Beginning on page 19 of the summary, there's also a section specifically about
Dr. Hatfill, which contains nothing new except for the number of people
who pointing him out to the FBI:

One individual who became
widely known in August 2002 as a person of investigative interest was
Dr. Steven Hatfill, a former researcher at USAMRIID. In the first four
months of the investigation, eight individuals
brought Dr. Hatfill’s name to the attention of the FBI as someone
suspected of being involved in the attacks.

Previously, it was thought the number was five. There are
details about how Dr. Hatfill was eliminated as a suspect.

There's a large section about the letters and how there could be secret
codes in the letters, but it doesn't really say anything about who
actually did the writing. It states that the "doodling"
was really a code related to DNA. At first reading, the logic
seems very convoluted, but after studying it, it become very incriminating for Dr. Ivins.

The 2,700 pages of supporting documents seem to contain a lot of
interesting material, too. But I've only looked at the first page
or two of each section.

Hopefully, a lot of people in the media will read through it and find
interesting things to write about. I certainly wouldn't want to
be the only person commenting on it all.

I'll spend some more time on it tomorrow.
February 19, 2010 (B) - As
promised, the DOJ's web site now includes an
official announcement about the closing of the Amerithrax
case. There are many many documents being released, including a
96-page summary which I'm about to study as my first task for this
afternoon. Here's the offical press release:

The Justice Department,
FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service today announced that the
investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks, which killed five
individuals and sickened 17 others, has formally concluded.

Earlier today, representatives of the FBI and Justice
Department
provided a 92-page investigative summary along with attachments to
victims of the attacks, relatives of the victims and appropriate
committees of Congress. This document sets forth a summary of the
evidence developed in the "Amerithrax" investigation, the largest
investigation into a bio-weapons attack in U.S. history. As disclosed
previously, the Amerithrax investigation found that the late Dr. Bruce
Ivins acted alone in planning and executing these attacks.

The investigative summary and the attachments are now
accessible to the
public and have been posted to the Justice Department Web site at www.usdoj.gov/amerithrax under
the Freedom of Information Act. In addition, roughly 2,700 pages of FBI
documents related to the Amerithrax case are now accessible to the
public and have been posted to the FBI website at http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/amerithrax.htm
under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Amerithrax Task Force, which was comprised of
roughly 25 to 30
full-time investigators from the FBI, U.S. Postal Inspection Service
and other law enforcement agencies, as well as federal prosecutors from
the District of Columbia and the Justice Department’s Counterterrorism
Section, expended hundreds of thousands of investigator work hours on
this case. Their investigative efforts involved more than 10,000
witness interviews on six different continents, the execution of 80
searches and the recovery of more than 6,000 items of potential
evidence during the course of the investigation. The case involved the
issuance of more than 5,750 grand jury subpoenas and the collection of
5,730 environmental samples from 60 site locations.

Investigators had been on
the verge of closing the case last year but government lawyers decided
to conduct a further review of what evidence could be shared with the
public, according to several people familiar with the case.

Officials were hesitant about
releasing some information because of concerns about violating privacy
rights and grand jury secrecy, said those familiar with the case, who
spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to
discuss internal deliberations.

The article also contains a lot of
the incorrect information we've seen over the past eight years.

February
14-15, 2010 - I don't really know
what
I know until I see what I write. When I write things
down, my brain sorts everything out and decides what I really know and
what is actually unknown, just possible, probable or very likely.

In a discussion last week, I wrote a few thoughts about what might be
delaying the closing of the Amerithrax case. The virtual shutting
down of the government because of "Snowmegeddon" or "Snowpocolypse" or
the "Snowtastrophe" is a likely explanation, but I don't know it for
certain. I couldn't envision the FBI and DOJ holding a press
conference when no one can get to the press conference due to the
weather, not even the FBI and DOJ people holding the conference.
But the idea that they might hold such a conference as soon as the
weather breaks doesn't look hopeful. Things are probably going to
be in turmoil for awhile. The rest of the world didn't stop while
the people in Washington were focused on digging out of the snow to get
groceries. Closing the Amerithrax investigation may not be a top
priority.

I don't even know for certain that there were plans to hold a press
conference. All I had was "vibes." Nothing concrete.
The plans to close the case
at the end of January appeared solid. But those plans didn't turn
into real events.

I'm going to try to avoid discussing when the case will be
closed until I
get some solid information
about it.

But that doesn't mean there aren't other things to think and
write
about today.

Last week, someone suggested that I considered myself to be "an amateur
scientist." I doubt that I ever even implied that I was an
amateur scientist. I
consider myself to be a "science buff." I like science. I
read science magazines
and
articles for enjoyment,
particularly things to do with physics or astronomy, and I love science
fiction. I'm also an analyst, and, of course, as an analyst I
also use
the scientific
method:

Ask a Question

Do Background Research

Construct a Hypothesis

Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment

Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion

Communicate Your Results

I simply use research and logic
experiments instead of
test tube experiments. And, when I communicate my results
on this web site I'm also asking a new question: Is my analysis
correct? If someone supplies new facts which say I am not
correct,
the hypothesis is revised and the method is repeated using
the additional new facts.

I'm also a
technical writer. A technical writer translates technical jargon
into layman's language. I spent decades
describing in
layman's language the workings of computers and
computer systems. And for the past eight years or so, I've been
doing a lot of technical
writing
about anthrax spores on this web site.

That background came in handy last week when I got into a
brief discussion about evolution.
I was discussing the anthrax case with someone who appeared to be
getting unreasonably upset at any mention of the word evolution. The Japanese paper
discussed in recent weeks suggested that Bacillus bacteria evolved to utilize silicon in their
spore coats in order to protect them from acid in an animal's
stomach. Then Peter
Setlow's article suggested that Bacillus bacteria may have also evolved to utilize silicon in their
spore coats to provide structural
rigidity. The person with whom I was discussing these
papers was seemingly taking a
Creationist stance by declaring the Japanese article to be
"crap" and the
Setlow article to be "myopic" and "ignorant." Period. She
was just making
statements of beliefs. No
justification or explanations.

So, I asked questions. When pressed for some explanation of her
point of view, she declared
that in the environment where a Bacillus bacterium would normally grow,
there is "VIRTUALLY
NO DAMN SILICON AVAILABLE!" And sand doesn't count, since it
would have to be bioavailable
silicon.

“Until the seventies
silicon
was not considered to be essential for
the metabolism of humans; only ‘low’ concentrations of silicon were
found in human tissue. Today we know that silicon is important for a
good health; silicon is an essential trace element for humans! The
human body contains 7 grams of Silicon, far more than other essential
trace elements like Manganese (Mn), Iron (Fe), Copper (Cu) or Zink
(Zn). Silicon is found in high concentrations in connective
tissues
like cartilage and bone and also in hair and nails.”

And, of
course, grazing animals would likely have even more silicon in their
systems due to the high silicon content of grasses and grains.

The
person who argued that there was "no damn silicon available" ignored
the facts I had found and simply moved on to a different
argument. She told a "story" often used to get layman
listeners to laugh at all
scientists and their ridiculous methods. It was the
jumping frog story. It's a popular story
frequently told by Creationists.

An idea occurred to me. I asked the question: Do you believe that
evolution is junk
science? No answer. Hmm.

I awoke on Wednesday morning with my brain going about 90 miles per
hour on a question related to the silicon found in spore coats.
My subconscious had evidently been comparing a spore coat to a human
skull. The human skull bone is there to protect the brain inside,
just as the spore coat is there to protect the DNA core inside.
Strangely enough, the human skull also has a flexible "exosporium"
which we call "skin," and the Ames spore exosporium also has "hairs."

I envisioned a tiny primative "DNA brain" of the Bacillus anthracis bacterium.
When the bacterium kills its host and spills out onto the ground via
the animal's
excretions, it
detects
that it cannot survive very long due to lack of food. So, it
forms a
hard "skull" around its "DNA brain" to protect it, and it goes into
stasis to await better living conditions.

I liked the idea of
imagining each spore as a little skull with a
DNA-brain hidden inside waiting for what it needs to get back into
living-and-growing mode once again. Could there be a biological
evolution-based connection?

That question was quickly
answered
by doing some research. The answer was: NO. I examined the images from the 1980 Stewart, et al article,
and I
found
that they don't show any
connection between calcium and silicon
as one would expect if both are related to bones and structural
rigidity. (Peter Setlow's suggestion was still bouncing around in
my head.) Calcium appeared to be distributed fairly
evenly throughout the spore's interior.
It was as if the spore coat was a container, and the calcium was one of
the materials inside the
container. The same thing with phosphorus, the other principal
element found in bones. So, my hypothesis was totally shot
down. Back to the drawing board.

If the anthrax spore coat
can't
be
compared to bone because it isn't mostly calcium and phosphorus,
to what can it be biologically compared? It seemed clear that
comparing
creatures at the
opposite ends of the evolutionary process was not the way to go in
developing an hypothesis. Bacillus bacteria is a very simple form
of life. One cell, asexual. That's about as simple as life
gets. Human beings have evolved into as complicated a
creature as one can imagine.

Is there a single cell creature that routinely uses silicon as a coat
of
some kind? Yes, of course. Diatoms.

Diatoms??? I'm not a microbiologist. How do I even know about diatoms? I know
about diatoms because eight years ago I was in an argument where
someone thought that crushed diatom shells might have been used to coat
the
attack spores. It was a way of getting tiny silica particles of
the right size. During that argument I did a lot of research
into
diatoms.

So, I have
single
celled Bacillus anthracis
which sometimes incorporates
silicon into their spore coats. And
I have single celled diatoms which routinely
build coats of
silica. Another name for
diatoms is Bacillariophyta, because some
species of diatoms reproduce the same way Bacillus anthracis reproduces, by
growing lengthwise and then dividing in two, creating strings of cells
which look
very much like strings of Bacillus
anthracis:

Anthrax

Diatoms

Wikipedia
says
this about the dividing cell process of reproduction and the use of
silica in building cell walls:

Diatom cells are contained
within
a unique silicate (silicic acid) cell
wall comprising two separate valves (or shells). The biogenic
silica that the cell wall is composed of is synthesised intracellularly
by the polymerisation of
silicic acid monomers. This material is then extruded to the
cell exterior and added to the wall. Diatom cell walls are also called frustules or tests, and their two
valves typically overlap one over the other like the two halves of a petri
dish.
In most species, when a diatom divides to produce two daughter cells,
each cell keeps one of the two halves and grows a smaller half within
it. As a result, after each division cycle the average size of diatom
cells in the population gets smaller. Once such cells reach a certain
minimum size, rather than simply divide vegetatively, they reverse this decline by forming
an auxospore. This expands in size to give
rise to a much larger cell, which then returns to size-diminishing
divisions.

If I'm reading that correctly, it says there's a time when the repeated
use of silicon to build cell walls causes problems for the diatom and
an auxoSPORE
must be created. Like most spores, auxospores seem to
involve going into a period of "dormancy." But what's really
important is that there's a
"program" in the diatom DNA for
turning the utilization of silica on and off. And the program's trigger
has to do with spore formation. And it's an on-off switch, it's not
something that causes gradual changes. Could that help explain
why a percentage of Bacillus
bacteria in a given batch utilize silicon in their spore coats and the
rest
contain no silicon at all?

But, Bacillus bacteria are a less complex type of cell than
diatoms. It's prokaryotic
cells versus eukaryotic cells. Bacillus bacteria are
prokaryotic. Simple prokaryotic bacteria were the first forms of
life. They were the ONLY forms of life for billions of
years. Complex diatoms are eukaryotic. The more complex
diatoms MUST have evolved from the less complex prokaryotic bacteria.

That means I'm probably talking about a common ancestor, rather than
existing bacteria evolving from existing diatoms.

Diatoms are
found in
water, and Bacillus bacteria are
found on land. And we know that land creatures evolved
from sea
creatures. Land slime could have evolved from sea slime.
Hmm. That logic "test" works, too.

This diatom
hypotheis
says
a Bacillus
bacteria's ability to absorb silicon into its spore coat isn't a recent
ability developed from the natural selection process of going through
the acids in an animal's stomach, it's an ancient ability that is still
programmed in its
DNA from the time when its distant ancestors lived in the sea.

The Japanese paper
says, "As far as we know,
diatoms, plants, and
animals accumulate silicate as silica."
And their experiments seem to confirm that. But if
there is an evolutionary
connection
between diatoms and Bacillus bacteria, the idea that silica in the
bacteria is the result of an evolutionary process involving the acid in
the stomach of animals would be disproven.
Peter Setlow's article which suggests that the
silica provides structural rigidity would be supported.
The diatom hypothesis is
not something I can test. A
DNA expert might be able to confirm or disprove it. I'll mention
it to such
an expert, someone whose area of expertise is both DNA and anthrax
ancestry. He might find it interesting, or it might give him a
good laugh.

Since I'm just an analyst and a science buff and cannot
do any scientific
experiments, I've taken the diatom hypothesis about as far as I can
take
it. It's so far outside of my areas of expertise that, even
though
the reasoning
seems solid, I only have a
confidence level of about 10
percent. For all I know, there could be dozens of
scientific articles that are decades old which totally disprove any
such
connection, but I don't know the required key words to find them.
(Or there
could be a hundred articles
on evolution which say exactly the same thing I'm saying.)
Meanwhile, however, I can use the diatom hypothesis to test a second
hypothesis.

If the probable Creationist goes into a fuming fury as a result of
reading this communication of my diatom hypothesis, then I'm probably
on the
right track with my second hypothesis - that she's a Creationist.
If she calmly points out my errors with
solid scientific facts and reasoning, then
I'm definitely on the wrong track.

When I write something that is totally wrong, people usually point out
my errors very quickly.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, February 7,
2010, thru Saturday, February 13, 2010
February 13, 2010 - This morning I
found an email from The Baltimore Sun in my inbox, requesting that I
either remove copies of all Baltimore Sun articles from this web site
or pay a
license fee to use them. Since this is a free site with no
advertising, and even though I believe I was within "Fair Use"
guidelines when using the articles, I had no choice but to delete my
copies of all Baltimore
Sun
articles.

February 9, 2010 - If you click HERE,
you'll see a beautiful view of the final NASA shuttle night launch.

February 8, 2010 - Someone just
brought to my attention an article by Professor Peter Setlow who
teaches Molecular, Microbial and Structural Biology at the University
of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington, CT. The article is on
The American Society for Microbiology's web site, and it's about "Silicate
in Bacterial Spores." It's a review of the Japanese
study which showed that silica accumulates in spore coats to
counter the effects of acid in an animal's stomach. Professor
Setlow suggests an additional
explanation:

Indeed, whereas the spores’
silicate plays no role in spore resistance
to heat, hydrogen peroxide, UV radiation or NaOH, it significantly
increases spore resistance to killing by 0.1-0.4 N mineral acids. This
increased acid resistance might be particularly important in spores of
pathogens such as B. cereus and B. anthracis that
may pass through an acidic mammalian digestive tract. On the other
hand, this would not be important in the alkaline digestive tract of
the insect forms for which B. thuringiensis is pathogenic.
Therefore, it seems likely that
the spores’ silicate layer may serve an
additional function. Since silicate accumulation in other organisms can
impart structural rigidity,
perhaps silicate plays such a role for
spores as well. This leaves us with yet more interesting
questions to
address to these spores.

Either or both
explanations could be valid. They're certainly far more
reasonable than any "weaponization" theory.

February
7, 2010 - Hmm. Again I was
thinking of writing just one word as my comment for today: Waiting.

But, yesterday, "Anonymous Scientist" changed my mind. He
thoughtfully wrote a comment for
me and posted it on Lew
Weinstein's web site:

anonymous
scientistsaid

February 6, 2010 at 3:55 pm

To save Ed some time this
week-end
I have thoughtfully penned his Sunday comment in this handy
cut-and-paste:

February 7, 2010 – So, we’re
at
“the end of the first week of
February” and the Amerithrax case has not yet been officially closed.
While I haven’t heard anything at all from any of my anonymous sources,
I have to assume that the official closing of the Amerithrax
investigation, which I said was planned for “the end of January or at
the very latest the end of the first week of February,” was delayed by
the sudden scheduling of the Winter Olympics next week.

The President wouldn’t want
the
impact of the Winter Olympics to be
diluted or sidetracked by some unrelated announcement from the DOJ, a
department in his Executive Branch of the government. After all, the
Winter Olympics isn’t just a game. It’s a worldwide event, an
announcement of togetherness, a call to action. It’s followed by
meetings with members of congress, by discussions pundits on the
weekend talk shows and by reviews and comments in the Sunday editions
and in national magazines like Time and Newsweek, which go to press on
the weekend for delivery on Monday. Closing the Amerithrax case in the
middle of all that would be unthinkable. The idea is to get as many
people as possible focused on helping to advance and improve the art of
downhill ski-ing. Discussions of other matters don’t help.

But I do know one thing. The
slight
delay to proving that Bruce
Ivins acted alone in creating the engineered powder sent to Congress,
and the 99% certainty that he coerced a young 6 year old boy from his
wife’s day-care center into writing the envelopes, had NOTHING to do
with the true believer junk science nonsense written by the conspiracy
theorist Ed Epstein in the Wall Street Journal. After all, the FBI lab
director responded to this on the official FBI website – and we all
know that FBI lab directors always respond to junk science preposterous
nonsense written by conspiracy theorists and true believers on the
internet. If what was written by Epstein wasn’t junk science nonsense
the FBI would have completely ignored the junk science nonsense posted
by the conspiracy theorist Epstein.

I’m keeping my ear to the
ground,
with my fingers crossed while I
wait for something to happen – hopefully very soon. My anonymous source
may email me any day now with a new date for closing the case which I
suspect will contain a full confession from Dr Ivins that has been
suppressed by the FBI for the last 2 years.

Actually, I have no solid
information about what is
delaying the closing of the case. But I don't think it has
anything to do with the Olympics.

And, I have some thoughts about the junk science used by "Anonymous
Scientist" and others like him. It's a subject I've mentioned
before, but
I might as well mention it again, since the conspiracy theorists
continue to totally ignore it even though it's the most significant
thing we've learned about the attack anthrax spores in the past eight
years.

Onlysome of the attack spores contained silicon
in their spore coats.

124
spores from the Leahy letter were analyzed and only 97 spores (76%)
contained silicon.111 spores from the
Daschle
letter were analyzed and only 73
spores (66%)
contained silicon.141 spores from the NY
Post
letter were analyzed and only 91
spores (65%)
contained silicon.

Some other samples contained silicon in their spore coats,
too. And some did not.

304
spores from three flask
RMR-1029 samples were analyzed and no
spores (0%) contained silicon.
113 spores from one flask RMR-1030
sample were analyzed and only 7 spores (6%) contained silicon.172 spores from one Dugway
sample were analyzed and only 50 spores (29%) contained silicon.

In addition, Sandia Labs did some tests on what the FBI described
only
as "evidence" spores:

NEVER
100%! The goal of any military "weaponization" process using
silica would be
to affect 100% of the
spores. Any process where Silicon is deliberately added would presumably
also want 100% of the
spores to be affected.
Another key fact: An Ames
strain spore from the attack anthrax that contains silicon in the spore
coat cannot be
distinguished from an Ames strain spore containing silicon in flask
RMR-1030, which we know that Dr. Ivins created.

Therefore, if a spore
in the
attack
anthrax is to be considered "weaponized" because it contains silicon in
its spore coat, then all the spores that Dr. Ivins created in flask
RMR-1030 which contained silicon in their spore coats must also be considered
"weaponized." And Dr. Ivins
"weaponized" them.The
only difference would be that the attack spores were dried and the
RMR-1030 spores were still suspended in a liquid. But drying is
NOT a complex or secret process. Wet spores will dry out all by
themselves if placed in a dry area. Any microbiologist would know
that.

In December of 2001, Dr. Ivins swabbed down more than 20 areas in
his lab which he claimed were contaminated by a sloppy lab
technician. Did he really do it to remove any trace of evidence
of his
crime? Or did he do it because he knew that spilled spores would
dry out and might aerosolize? Both
explanations would be incriminating.

In recent months we've also learned more about the "naturally
occurring" silicon found in many spores, which the conspriracy
theorists dispute. We learned why Bacillus bacteria incorporate
silicon into their spore coats. It's a result of evolution, giving the spores protection against the acids
that would be found in an animal's stomach.

We also learned from work
done at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories that simply using
a growth medium that contains silicon (or deliberately adding silicon
to a growth medium) does not by
itself determine what percentage
of the spores will form with silicon in their spore coats.
In other words, putting more silicon in the growth medium does not automatically produce a higher
percentage of spores containing silicon.

So, there's really only one unanswered question. The question is
unimportant to the Amerithrax investigation, since the answer tells us
nothing about the culprit. But it would answer all remaining
microbiology questions about the silicon found in the attack
spores. The question is: What causes Bacterium
A in a batch to incorporate silicon into the spore coat it is creating
while Bacterium B in the same batch does not
incorporate silicon into its spore coat? Scientists at Dugway
working on the Amerithrax investigation produced spores with silicon in
their spore coats just like those in
the attack anthrax, but not
the same percentage.
29% of the spores created at Dugway contained siliconjust
like the attack spores, but 29% is less than half the
percentage of spores in the attack powders that contained silicon.

The work done in Japan which answered the question of why Bacillus bacteria utilize
silicon also seems to suggest that the temperature
at a specific point in the spore forming process might be one factor
which determines how many
bacteria utilize
silicon, but there seem to be other factors, too.

The answer cannot have anything to do with "weaponization" since the
silicon in the spore coat has no "weaponization" benefit toward
aerosolization. It seems
to have something to do with not following standard lab
procedures. And someone producing anthrax spores in secret
cannot be expected to follow standard lab procedures.

So, why did the
FBI respond to "the
true believer junk science nonsense written by the conspiracy
theorist Ed Epstein in the Wall Street Journal?" That's easy
to answer. It was
nonsense printed in The Wall Street Journal
and repeated by others who were foolish enough to believe what Dr.
Epstein wrote. It wasn't
just routine conspiracy theory nonsense on the Internet. Dr. Hassell didn't respond to the nonsense
point by point because
that would get into the findings of the Amerithrax investigation, which
is still officially open and the evidence is therefore still mostly
confidential. Instead, Dr. Hassell merely pointed out that the
FBI
scientists did not work on the scientific aspects of the case all by
themselves. The FBI scientists worked in "consultation with
numerous
subject matter experts in technical panels," and they worked in
"collaboration with partner laboratories in government, academia and
the private sector throughout the course of the investigation."
Furthermore, the science that was utilized in the Amerithrax
investigation is being thoroughly reviewed by the National Acadamies of
Science to
verify that it was solid, reliable
and accepted science.

Therefore, when conspiracy theorists attack the science used in the
Amerithrax case, they are also attacking everyone in the partner
laboratories in the government, in the laboratories run
by academia and the laboratories run by the private sector who assisted
in the scientific investigation. The conspiracy theorists
are saying that all of the hundreds of non-FBI scientists who worked on
the
case must either be incompetent or part of some vast conspiracy because
their findings do not support what the conspiracy theorists
believe as a
result of their own junk science
fantasies.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, January 31,
2010, thru Saturday, February 6, 2010
February 1, 2010 (B) - I just received a copyrights-related
threat regarding the information about the Hatfill v
Ashcroft deposition material that I posted yesterday. The demand
(which is not
from Lew Weinstein)
is
that I remove the detailed information. I've done so. The
link to the
exact same material on Lew Weinstein's web site remains
intact. I looked
through some of the deposition material, and I couldn't find anything
that is any
longer of any significance, anyway.

February 1, 2010 (A) - In this
morning's
Wall Street Journal, Dr. Chris Hassell from FBI's labs in Quantico, VA,
responds to Edward Jay Epstein's opinion piece with a brief letter to
the editor titled "Anthrax
Case: FBI Used Good Science." Here's the letter in its
entirety:

Regarding Edward Jay
Epstein's "The
Anthrax Attacks Remain Unsolved"
(op-ed, Jan. 25): From the outset, the FBI's scientific work in the
anthrax case has had a foundation in validation and verification of its
approach and conclusions. This process began within weeks of the
initial events of 2001 and has included: consultation with numerous
subject matter experts in technical panels; collaboration with partner
laboratories in government, academia and the private sector throughout
the course of the investigation; ongoing efforts to publish our work
and that of our partner labs in peer-reviewed technical journals;
analytical data and reports provided to the National Academy of
Sciences, so it can evaluate the scientific analysis applied to the
evidence in the anthrax investigation.

The FBI is confident in the
scientific
findings that were reached in this investigation. We utilized
established biological and chemical analysis techniques and applied
them in an innovative manner to reach these findings.

D. Christian
Hassell, Ph.D.Quantico, Va.

Unfortunately, facts
won't override any of the beliefs of the conspiracy theorists and True
Believers. But, if enough facts are made public, at least it will
make it more difficult for them to find followers.

January
31, 2010 - So, we're at "the end of
January" and the Amerithrax case has not yet been officially
closed. While I haven't heard
anything at all from any
sources, I have to assume that the official closing of the
Amerithrax investigation, which I said was planned for "the end of January,"
was delayed by the sudden scheduling of the President's State of the
Union
address for Wednesday in the last week of January.

The President wouldn't want the impact of his State of the Union
address to be diluted or sidetracked by some unrelated announcement
from the DOJ, a department in his Executive Branch of the
government. After all, the State of the Union Address
isn't just a speech. It's a plan, an announcement of goals, a
call to action. It's followed by meetings
with members of congress, by discussions pundits on the weekend talk
shows and
by reviews and comments in the Sunday editions and in national
magazines like Time
and Newsweek, which go to press on the weekend for delivery on
Monday. Closing the Amerithrax case in the middle of all that
would be unthinkable. The idea is to get as many people as
possible focused on helping to advance and improve The State of The
Union. Discussions of other matters don't help.

I don't know if The National Geographic Channel had any inside
information when they rescheduled a rerun of "Hunting
the Anthrax Killer" from this the last weekend in January to next
weekend, the first weekend in February, but there
are certainly a lot of "vibes" indicating that could be the
case.

I'm keeping my ear to the ground, with my fingers crossed while I wait
for something to happen - hopefully very soon.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, January 24,
2010, thru Saturday, January 30, 2010
January 30, 2010 (C) (UPDATED)
- Lew
Weinstein's web site contains links to 12 volumes of
deposition materials
from the Hatfill v Ashcroft civil lawsuit. It's going to take
time to find out if there's anything of significance or importance in
them. Here are the links from the site and brief
descriptions of the contents:

January 30, 2010 (B) - According to BusinessWeek,
there have now been 10 deaths from anthrax contaminated heroin in
Europe. The article doesn't give
any details about the two additional cases that weren't in
previous reports except to suggest that one was a case in Scotland
which occurred before the first correctly
diagnosed
case. So, they could both be old cases which were
previously
mis-diagnosed.

January 30, 2010 (A) - Another
opinion about the Amerithrax case appeared in The
Washington Examiner's blog today. It's from the Examiner's
"senior
political analyst" Michael Barone, and it's another rehash of the
Edward Jay Epstein WSJ opinion piece, except that Barone suggests that
it
could mean that he's been right all along:

It seemed to me in
September 2001 and it seems to me today, eight years
and four months later, that there is a high likelihood that a state
actor was behind the anthrax attacks.

As I stated a few days
ago, nothing spreads faster than incorrect
information - particularly if it
confirms some belief.

January 28, 2010 - I don't know why
we're suddenly getting this new flood of conspiracy theory material
arguing that Dr. Ivins' was innocent and that the anthrax attack spores
were "weaponized" in some secret way that only a government -run
bioweapons program could accomplish. This morning I was advised
that a new feature documentary called "The Killer Strain" is currently
in production. It's supposedly based upon Marilyn Thompson's book
from 2003. There's a YouTube video
about it. It seems to be nothing but opinions from friends and
conspiracy theorists who believe Ivins was innocent because he was
incapable of making such a supersophisticated weapon. And it
seems clear that no amount of proof that the spores were NOT "weaponized" in any military
way will change their minds.

More examples of the blind leading the blind can be found HERE
and HERE.

January 25, 2010 - If you had any
illusions that junk science has been quelled by the real science of the
Amerithrax investigation, I suggest you read this morning's edition
of The Wall Street Journal. It contains an opinion piece by
Edward J. Epstein titled "The
Anthrax Attacks Remain Unsolved - The FBI disproved its main theory
about how the spores were weaponized." It repeats a lot of
the junk science used by conspiracy theorists, plus total inaccuracies
and various other nonsense to argue that the presence of silicon in the
attack spores proves that the attack spores were "weaponized" and Dr.
Ivins could not be the culprit. Example:

The FBI's six-year
investigation was the largest inquest in its
history, involving 9,000 interviews, 6,000 subpoenas, and the
examination of tens of thousands of photocopiers, typewriters,
computers and mailboxes. Yet it failed to find a shred of evidence that
identified the anthrax killer—or even
a witness to the mailings. With
the help of a task force of scientists, it found a flask of anthrax
that closely matched—through its genetic markers—the anthrax used in
the attack.

A witness to the
mailings? If you mail letters in the middle of the night, how
many witnesses can there be? And who in their right mind thinks
that witnesses are always right and always present?

Another example:

Eventually, the FBI zeroed
in on Ivins. Not only did he have access to
the anthrax, but FBI agents
suspected he had subtly misled them into
their Hatfill fiasco.

Whaaaa??!! Dr. Ivins
misled the FBI
into "their Hatfill fiasco"!!?? What evidence does Dr. Epstein
have of that? He doesn't say.Any examination of the facts would clearly
show who was to blame for that "fiasco."

More nonsense from the
opinion piece:

Silicon was used in the 1960s
to weaponize anthrax. Through an
elaborate process, anthrax spores were coated with the substance to
prevent them from clinging together so as to create a lethal aerosol.
But since weaponization was banned by international treaties, research
anthrax no longer contains silicon, and the flask at Fort
Detrick
contained none.

Yet the anthrax grown from it
had silicon, according to the U.S.
Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. This silicon explained why, when
the letters to Sens. Leahy and Daschle were opened, the anthrax
vaporized into an aerosol. If so, then somehow silicon
was added to the
anthrax. But Ivins, no matter how weird he may have been, had
neither
the set of skills nor the means to attach silicon to anthrax spores.

At a minimum, such a
process would require highly specialized
equipment that did not exist in Ivins's lab—or, for that matter,
anywhere at the Fort Detrick facility.

The attack anthrax did NOT vaporize into an
aerosol. No one was injured by opening the Daschle letter, and
most of the spores inside the letter remained inside the letter. All of the Leahy
powder that hadn't sifted out was recovered. Click HERE to view a picture of the
Leahy powder. The Leahy letter may have been opened in a
biosafety cabinet, but that wouldn't prevent
"vaporization." Stephanie Dailey opened the AMI letter and
suffered no ill effects.

There was nothing special about the attack anthrax other than it was
dried in a way that allowed it to crumble easily. The repeated
claim that Dr. Ivins couldn't have created it is absolute junk science nonsense.

More nonsense from the
opinion piece:

Natural contamination was an
elegant theory that ran into problems
after Congressman Jerry Nadler pressed FBI Director Robert Mueller in
September 2008 to provide the House Judiciary Committee with a missing
piece of data: the precise percentage of silicon contained in the
anthrax used in the attacks.

The answer came seven months
later on April 17, 2009. According to
the FBI lab, 1.4% of the powder in the Leahy letter was silicon. "This
is a shockingly high proportion," explained Stuart Jacobson, an expert
in small particle chemistry. "It is a number one would expect from the
deliberate weaponization of anthrax, but not from any conceivable
accidental contamination."

Nevertheless, in an attempt
to back up
its theory, the FBI contracted
scientists at the Lawrence Livermore
National Labs in California to conduct experiments in which
anthrax is
accidently absorbed from a media heavily laced with silicon. When the
results were revealed to the National Academy Of Science in September
2009, they effectively blew the
FBI's theory out of the water.

The scientists at Lawrence Livermore did NOT
do their work as a
result of any request by the FBI. The work was funded by a Department of
Homeland Security program to study microbial forensics. The work that
was done was very limited in scope and proved very little regarding the
anthrax attacks.

The Livermore scientists had
tried 56
times to replicate the high silicon content without any success. Even
though they added increasingly high amounts of silicon to the media,
they never even came close to the 1.4% in the attack anthrax. Most
results were an order of magnitude lower, with some as low as .001%.

What these tests
inadvertently demonstrated is that the anthrax
spores could not have been accidently contaminated by the nutrients in
the media.

Just plain nonsense. The tests at
Lawrence Livermore demonstrated no such thing. They just
demonstrated that there were likely other
factors involved in getting
Bacillus
bacteria to take in silicon for incorporation into spore coats.

I could go on and on, but I'd have to quote nearly the entire article,
and The Wall Street Journal doesn't like me doing that.

Suffice to say: The Wall Street Journal opinion piece is the opinion of
a VERY misinformed person.
Most of what he wrote is just rephrasing of what he wrote on his
own blog. I commented on that a month ago, on December 22.

And to make matters worse, Right Wing organizations are picking up on
this nonsense and reporting it as news from The Wall
Street Journal. Click HERE
or HERE
or HERE.
Maybe it's time to quote from the Bible - Matthew 15:14:

“Let them alone. They are
blind leaders of the
blind. And if the blind
leads the blind, both will fall into a ditch.“

January
24, 2010 - When the Amerithrax case
is officially closed and everyone gets the opportunity to read the
reports and supporting documentation that the FBI and DOJ will be
releasing to the
public, I wonder how many new books will be written about the
case. I might contact some agents and publishers to see if I can
get them
interested in a revised version of my book. (I definitely won't self-publish any kind of new
edition. It's just too expensive.)

At the moment, however, I'm somewhat at a loss as to what "approach" to
take when writing a new version. It would have to be my unique
perspective, a book that no one else could write. I doubt that
any publisher would want a history
of the anthrax attacks written by me. A half dozen newspaper
reporters will probably doing that sort of thing. Even if I could
do a better job, selling books is about marketing. It's simply easier
to sell a history book written by a respected, well-known reporter,
even if that reporter got virtually everything wrong for the past 8
years.

Besides, the best history books are those written by insiders.
There'll probably be a half dozen books written by people who were
actually part of the investigation.

The current edition of my book is essentially a "working
hypothesis." I laid out all the known facts as of December 2004
and analyzed them to see what the facts had to say about the
case.

The facts said that
Dr. Steven Hatfill was innocent.
The facts said that al Qaeda had nothing to do with the attacks.
The facts said that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had nothing to do with the
attacks.
The facts said that the attack spores were not coated with silica.
The facts said that the attack spores were not "weaponized" in any military
sense of the term.
The facts said the attack spores could have been created by a lone
knowledgeable individual.
The facts said the culprit was an American scientist.
The facts said the culprit was motivated by fears of Muslim terrorists
using biological weapons.
The facts said the the J-Lo letter was unrelated to the anthrax
attacks.
The facts said that Kathy Nguyen was killed by spores from the first
mailing, not the second.
The facts said things about the handwriting that haven't yet been
confirmed or disproved.

The facts also said that the media and
countless scientists were misled by simple human
errors made by scientists during the first days of the examination
of the attack spores. Those errors are still having an effect. We
have no way of knowing how many scientists read the incorrect
information printed in the media (including Science magazine) and never
read any of the reports which clearly showed that the initial
information was totally incorrect.
The bad information was reported for just a few weeks before it was
realized it was bad information. But no amount of solid good
information for the next eight years seems to have been able to wipe
out those first statements. First impressions are
definitely lasting impressions.

The facts also showed that aggresive conspiracy theorists and True
Believers can greatly complicate an investigation if the conspiracy theorists and/or
True Believers have credentials which impress people - particularly
people in the media. People in
the media tend to believe sources, not facts. But sources can
have
personal motives. Sources can have political agendas.
Sources
can be mistaken. Sources can lie. Facts do not lie.
But, facts can be misleading if you do not have all the facts.

For years the publicly
known
facts seemed to indicate that the anthrax mailer most likely
lived and worked in Central New Jersey. It was where the FBI's
Amerithrax investigation seemed to be focused. It didn't make
much sense
that a person would drive great distances to mail the letters, since he
might have to explain his absence from his home turf
during the time spent traveling. On the other hand, the "typical"
criminal doesn't commit crimes on his home turf. He wants to
throw suspicion elsewhere. Plus, there were unconfirmed reports that the copy
machine used to produce the letters was found in New Jersey. But,
unconfirmed reports
aren't facts.
And there was absolutely nothing
to suggest that the culprit was a diagnosed sociopath who made a practice of driving long
distances to mail letters and packages so they cannot be
traced back to their actual source. New facts can quickly turn
seemingly
unbelievable deeds into something very believable. In my book, I stated that
in Chapter 22 - "A Working Hypothesis" which ended with this:

All the pieces fit. But, I also know that I probably do not have all the relevant information. Some solid piece of evidence that I’ve
failed to find or properly
evaluate could easily change things. That’s what a “working hypothesis” is all about: to
present it for others to tear apart with new
facts which the hypothesis cannot explain. But, after three
long years of fielding challenges, this working hypothesis has remained virtually
unchanged. Furthermore, the theories of the challengers have mostly proven to
be largely based upon bad science or no science at all.

Very little of my book is about who did
it - for good reason: I didn't know
who did it. Somewhere I think I stated that I had
no more than a 20% confidence level in who the known facts indicated most likely did it.
The problem was: No other potential suspect generated even a 1%
confidence level. Yes, I had read Dr. Ivins' name in various
papers, but he was just a name - like dozens of other names. I
had absolutely no evidence
pointing to Dr. Ivins.

Interestingly, that appears to have been the FBI's situation for a long
time, too. It was years
before the science of the case truly started to point to flask RMR-1029
and the man who controlled it.

I'm not the best person to write a biography of Dr. Ivins,
either. That's another kind of book best left to reporters and
historians. I don't really have any interest in writing that kind
of book.

The
biggest mistake I made with my current book was to call it " Analyzing
The Anthrax Attacks - The First 3
Years."
I should have omitted "The First 3 Years." It automatically dated
the book, even though almost nothing
changed between the time I published it in March of 2005 and Dr. Ivins'
death, over three years later.

My "unique perspective" seems to be primarily one of standing between
scientists
who had solid facts and scientists and others who had only beliefs and
theories. I doubt that there's another person on this planet
who's spent more time talking with scientists who argue only beliefs
and who totally ignore facts which do not support their beliefs.
The scientists on the other side - the ones with the solid facts - do
not seem to have the patience or interest to argue with scientists who
rely almost totally on beliefs based upon junk science.

Most of my current book could still be used if I revised it to be
primarily about
the battles between real scientists and junk scientists. I might
even call it: "Analyzing the
Anthrax Attacks - Real Science vs
Junk Science."

That's something I'll have to think about. A more marketable
title might be: "Analyzing the
Anthrax Attacks - Facts vs Beliefs." I wish I'd used that
title on the current edition! The first words in the current
Introduction are:

Arguing About Anthrax
This book didn’t come about in any of the normal ways. There wasno assignment from an editor. There was
no sudden inspiration. I hadno passion about any “cause”. There
wasn’t even a mission or goal –unless wasting time can be considered a
“goal”.It came about as the result of three
years of arguing.

To revise and update that, all I need to do is to change "three years"
to "eight years."

But first I want to see how the junk scientists react to the closing of
the Amerithrax investigation and to the releasing of all the new
information that was previously confidential and accessable only to the
FBI and DOJ, the information which will presumably confirm what the FBI
and
DOJ have previously stated: Dr. Bruce was the culprit and he acted
alone.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, January 17,
2010, thru Saturday, January 23, 2010
January 24, 2010 (B) -
<{(%@#%$*&$^%^!!!! If it's not one thing it's
another! I just spent 3 hours
analyzing why I got 711 visitors yesterday, about 200 more than
normal. There's some kind of new spider called "80legs" which crawled
through my web site yesterday for 16
hours. Unlike Google, Cuil, Yahoo and all the other
search engines which send "spiders" through web sites in order to build
up their indexes,
80legs uses a different IP address
for every file it accesses on my site. So, instead of just
logging as one visit, as I'd
get from Google or Yahoo, my statistics show I got about
200 visits from all sorts of hosts
and countries! -- and they're all
seemingly from IP addresses which have never visited me before!
How can that not violate some Internet rule!!
&@#((#!@^*%%^&!!!!! Here's a sample of the
IP addresses and what they
mean:

I'll have to wait and
see if this was just a one-time thing or if they're going to visit
that way frequently. Checking back on the past week, I find that
they've visited on other days, but only 2 to 4 accesses per day.
They provide an address for questions and
complaints. *%^##@%&&*%!!! I planned to
waste my time on other things today!

Ah! With help, and after spending another couple hours on it, I've
learned that 80legs contracts with the owners of all those IP addresses
to use the addresses and
their computers during idle hours. "80Legs
partner Plura Processing, which aggregates the cycles, pays affiliates
to sign
up users to volunteer their idle processing time in exchange for
services like
virtual gifts."
(*(*$%$#^#^%$)#@!!! The
world is getting too complicated!! Interesting,
though.

Groan! After spending another couple hours on the problem, with
the help of others I
learned that I can just block 80legs with a robots.txt file. And,
while I'm at it, I'll also block Google's
image search. From what I can tell, 99% of the visitors who
come to my site via Google's image search aren't really looking for
information about the anthrax attacks of 2001. They're just
looking at pictures. So, it may have been a productive day after
all.

January
23, 2010 (A) - I don't know if
it means anything, but the repeat showings of the National Geographic
program "Hunting
The Anthrax Killer" have been rescheduled for Saturday February 6.

January 19, 2010 - I don't know if
it would have any effect on closing the Amerithrax case "at the end of
January" or not, but President Obama's first State Of The Union Address
is now
scheduled for Wednesday, January 27.

January 18, 2010 (B) - According to one
report, the number of deaths in Scotland from anthrax contaminated
heroin is now seven, up one
from the last report. Plus there's just been a death from anthrax
contaminated heroin in Germany.

January 18, 2010 (A) - I know it's
probably just a coincidence, but someone just advised me that the
National Geographic Channel program "Hunting
The Anthrax Killer," which first aired on July 26, 2009, might
air again "at the end of January." One
source source says it will air three
times: on Saturday January 30, 2010 at
10:00 PM ET, on Sunday January 31, 2010 at 1:00 AM ET and on Monday
February 1, 2010 at 1:00 PM ET.
However, another
source just mentions the February 1 date. And a third source
doesn't currently show the program airing on any
of those dates. Could it be that they haven't yet had time to
change
everything on their web site?

January
17, 2010 - For awhile, I was very
tempted to
write just one word as my comment for today: "Waiting."

The past week started out very
quiet. I
had to wonder if everyone might be waiting to see if I was right or
wrong when I
mentioned that the Amerithrax case may be officially closed "at the
end of January." I was certainly wrong when I thought the
case might be closed before the end of December, but that date was
based more on hope and "signs" than on facts. The "end of
January" time frame
is based upon actual statements made by people who would know.
But, it's still just a planned
time
frame. And, as we all know, real life is what happens while
we're making plans. The best laid plans of mice and men oft
go astray. Etc.

As an example, the President's State of the Union address, which is
normally planned for "late January" was delayed until February 2, but
then delayed again. It's apparently being delayed a second
time to allow
the Health Care Bill to get farther along, but February
2 is also the day that the final season premiere of "Lost" is
scheduled to air. There are dozens
of news stories asking if the
schedule change was made to avoid preempting the premiere of
"Lost." Could be. One of the most difficult tasks in the
world can be to try to figure out what's going on in someone else's
mind.

I pondered long and hard before even mentioning the "end of January"
time frame for closing the Amerithrax case. It would certainly
just have been safer to just wait
for
it to happen or to wait for some regular news outlet to mention the
planned time frame. They probably know a lot more of the details
than I
do. They're waiting. Maybe they're waiting because they've
been so totally wrong about so many other things related to the anthrax
attacks of 2001. The anthrax attacks could go down in history as
one of the most inaccurately reported events in history.
But, most likely they're just taking an "I'll believe it when I see it"
position.

My saying the Amerithrax case could be closed at the end of January
isn't quite
the same as The New York Times or The Washington Post saying it.
Many intelligent people consider them to be "the final word" on the
Amerithrax case. If
I say something that is wrong or that does not fit the facts, some
expert will usually
tell me about it so I can make the necessary correction as soon as
possible. The fact
that no one has corrected me about the "end of January" date
might/could/should
mean something, but some kind of confirmation
would mean a lot more.

I received an email from a well-known scientist who will have a book
about the case published later this year. The email contained a
nice complement for keeping everyone informed about the case for the
past eight years or so. It was the first time I'd been contacted
by that particular scientist. It was someone who might have inside
information about closing the case. I tried to read between the
lines, but there wasn't
anything there that I could reasonably discern.

On Friday, another scientist sent me an article which very vaguely
relates to the anthrax attacks of 2001. It says on the cover
page of the article that I'm supposed to refer to it as: G.
Chen, et al., Bacillus anthracis and
Bacillus subtilis spore surface properties and transport,
Colloids Surf. B: Biointerfaces (2010),
doi:10.1016/j.colsurfb.2009.12.012 The article is even
more complex than that description suggests. Complicated
mathematical formulae tend to give me brain-lock. But,
fortunately, one of the authors graciously helped me get through
it. The article is about how and why wetBacillus
anthracis spores stick to surfaces. The attack spores were
dry, of course,
but
there was a time when a conspiracy theorist was bombarding me with
scientific articles about how wet Bacillus spores stick to
surfaces. The conspiracy theorist argued that those articles were
proof that dry Bacillus spores would also
stick to surfaces and toeach
other due to van der
Waals forces if they weren't coated with silica particles as described
in that infamous 2003
Science magazine article that I've probably mentioned a thousand
times. His arguments were pure junk science, and I told him
so. And I wrote about it.

I don't know if any of the authors of this new article read those
comments, but the article actually sorts through and analyzes the three
components which could potentially cause spores in a wet solution to
stick to surfaces. Those three components are: (1) Electrostatic
forces, (2) Chemical forces (i.e., acid or base chemistry related) and
(3) van der Waals forces (a specialized, short range electrostatic
charge). The report suggests that only #2 (chemical force) is
significant when
talking about wet spores clinging to the walls of a hospital or a
person's lungs or to each other in a solution. Here are the
opening sentences of the abstract for the article:

Effective
decontamination of environments contaminated by Bacillus spores remains
a significant challenge since Bacillus
spores are highly resistant to killing and could plausibly adhere to
many non-biological as well as
biological surfaces. Decontamination of Bacillus spores can be
significantly improved if the chemical basis of spore adherence is
understood. In this research, we investigated the surface
adhesive properties of Bacillus subtilis and Bacillus anthracis spores.

The
hope behind the research is that, after having determined that chemical forces are the significant
binding forces utilized by spores, further work
can be done to develop new methods of decontamination and, perhaps, new
medicines. Here's part of the "conclusion":

A major conclusion from our work was that,
under our conditions, both B. subtilis and B. anthracis spores were monopolar
and negatively charged, in spite
of their divergent surface composition and architecture and, apparently, natural
ecology. We speculate that significant
evolutionary pressures direct these spore surfaces towards similar chemical properties
because, despite their differences in lifestyle, B. subtilis and B. anthracis spores benefit from relatively similar adhesive
characteristics. This may point towards important similarities in the survival in
the otherwise differing niches inhabited by
these organisms.

That's deep. My head hurts.

I certainly appreciate all the help that
knowledgeable, well-known and respected scientists from many different
fields have
provided to me over the years.
It's been an intense eight year course in chemistry, physics,
biology,
microbiology, psychology and probably a half-dozen other ologies.
The lessons have given me the confidence to act as an unofficial
referee in arguments between
scientists with solid facts and scientists with opinions and conspiracy
theories. But I'll be very happy when the NAS publishes the
results of their review. It should mean that the scientific
arguments are formally resolved. The conspiracy theorists and
True Believers will continue to argue forever, of course, but only in
the far distant background. From the Lunatic Fringe.

If the eight year Amerithrax investigation is actually officially
closed at the
end of January as planned, we should also learn a lot more about how
the
non-scientific aspects of the mystery were
solved and what kind of actual proof of Dr. Ivins' guilt was assembled
and evaluated. And, at
around the same time, but in a totally unrelated area, the answers to a
very different six
year scientific mystery might also be provided - one in which a lot
more people seem to be interested. Although I don't see it being
quite as important as the Amerithrax mystery. Like so many
others, I, too, really want to
know how
time travel explains the presence of the "smoke monster" in the TV
series "Lost."

All things come to he who can wait.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, January 10,
2010, thru Saturday, January 16, 2010
January 11, 2010 - These days I tend
to look for hidden meanings in every bit of news directly or indirectly
related to the anthrax attacks of 2001. The
Associated Press is reporting today that a federal panel is
recommending that researchers who work with the world's deadliest
pathogens undergo more frequent security screening. Makes sense
to me. And there may be no hidden extra significance to the
issuing of the report at this particular time.

January
10, 2010 (B) - The big discussions
last
week
were about the publication of a new scientific article related to (but not about) the anthrax attacks of
2001. The article in the January issue of the Journal of Bacteriology is titled "The Silicon Layer
Supports Acid Resistance of Bacillus cereus Spores." It was
written by a group of Japanese scientists from Hiroshima University,
and it is about natural occurring
silicon in spores. The article begins with this overview:

Silicon (Si) is
considered to be a “quasiessential” element for most living organisms.
However, silicate uptake in bacteria and its physiological functions
have remained obscure. We observed that Si is deposited in a spore coat
layer of nanometer-sized particles in Bacillus cereus and that the Si
layer enhances acid resistance. The novel acid resistance of the
spore mediated by Si encapsulation was also observed in other Bacillus
strains, representing a general adaptation enhancing survival under
acidic conditions.

The scientists did a large number of tests to determine why silicon accumulates in the
spore
coats of Bacillus spores. Among their findings and conclusions:

1. Silicate uptake
is related to spore formation.2. Silicate uptake occurs after the
spores acquire heat resistance in
their maturing process.3. Silicate is first incorporated in the
mother cell and then
accumulated in the spore during maturation.

6. One strain took up 15 times as much silicate (0.49 pg Si/spore) as
its closest relative B. cereus,
corresponding to approximately 6.3%
dry weight.

7. The acid resistance conferred by Si encapsulation may occur in
nature. Spores may encounter strong acids in
environments such as the digestive conditions in animal stomachs
(around 0.1 N HCl), indicating that a physiological function of Si in
bacteria may be to aid survival under these conditions.

8. The spore coat is related to the impermeability to the spore’s inner
membrane; thus, the spore coat is thought to confer resistance to toxic
chemicals.

They did some experiments to see if spores would take in Silicon after they were fully formed, and
the scientists found that they would not, further
debunking theories about some
kind of a "siliconizing monomer agent" being used as part of some
"weaponization" process. The Silicon
would only accumulate
in the spore coats if it was incorporated there by the mother germ during the spore forming process.

They also did some experiments to determine what form of Silicon is taken in by the
bacteria. They wrote, "As far as we know, diatoms, plants, and
animals accumulate silicate as silica."
And their experiments seem to confirm that.

An analysis by
materials researcher Joseph Michael at Sandia National Laboratories in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, convinced the FBI that no silica or other chemicals had been
added to the anthrax in the letters, as an earlier analysis by the
Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) had indicated.
Transmission electron microscopy by Michael and colleagues revealed
that the silicon AFIP researchers had detected in the samples was
contained inside the spores -- a natural occurrence documented in
previous research -- and not in a coating intended to make the anthrax
disperse more easily.

Everything in the article by the Japanese scientists seems to confirm
that Silicon is taken up naturally by Bacillus bacteria which
incorporate the Silicon into the spore coat when they form
spores. The news is that it is evidently incorporated to provide
acid resistance so the spores can pass through an animal's stomach and
get into the bloodstream. One might note that that ability
might be of particular value to Bacillus
anthracis.

The Japanese scientists also attempted to confirm that Silicon
absorption has nothing to do with any ability to aerosolize.
Unfortunately, the wording of their final statements confuse the issue
a bit:

When the anthrax
powder sent to the U.S. Senate in 2001 was found to be coated with unusual
silica, it was discussed whether the silica was related to spore
dispersion. We concluded that Si
encapsulation is not sufficient to make spores dispersible but does contribute to
survival under acidic conditions. Our findings also strongly indicate that
the anthrax spores were
harvested from culture on a silicate-containingmedium.

I would have written the first sentence of that section this way:

When the anthrax
powder sent to the U.S. Senate in 2001 was mistakenly assumed to be coated
with unusual silica, it was discussed whether the silica was related to spore
dispersion.

The Japanese scientists did some tests to see how well the spores
containing Silicon in their spore coats aerosolized. Here again,
they may have been
somewhat misled by the nonsense in the 2003 Science article. All
they
determined from their experiments was that the Silicon in the spore
coats played no role in
aerosolization:

Comparison of
low- and high-Si spores. To investigate the role of Si in spore
dispersion, we prepared spore powder by grinding freeze-dried spores in
a mortar. Then, we placed 10-mg samples of spore powder into clear
30-ml glass vials and shook them for a
few seconds. However, unlike the Senate anthrax spores that floated
freely (17), both low- and high-Si spores fell quickly to the bottom of the
vials and stayed there (data not shown). This result indicated that Si
accumulation alone did not make
spores dispersible. The electrostatic charge of spores could make them
repel one another and thus create self-dispersing spores (17).

They do not appear to have determined the
particle sizes after grinding freeze-dried spores in a mortar.
Particle size would be the key to aerosolization, not a static charge. A static
charge could cause the spores
to cling to the glass of the vials. The attack spores were almost
certainly not freeze-dried nor ground in a mortar nor shaken in a glass
vial. The bulk of the attack spores almost certainly had NO
static charge when placed in the envelopes, but jostling in the
envelopes or later handling by scientists could easily have added a
static charge to a few of the spores, thus causing the famous
observation by Peter Jahrling that the spores were flying around like "jumping beans" when he first tried examining
them under an SEM. That observation led to a lot of misleading
discussion
about
the imagined static charge in the 2003 Science article.

Summing up: After initial false assumptions, when it was finally
determined that the Silicon was inside
the spore coats and not on the outside of the attack spores, it was
concluded that the Silicon was accumulated there through some natural
process. The Japanese study explains the process and its
biological purpose. Their findings "strongly indicate" that the
attack anthrax spores were harvested from a culture grown on or in "a
silicate-containing medium." They also seem to suggest that
temperature may
play a
key role in determining whether a bacterium will take in Silicon or not.

They don't help explain why it appears that some bacteria in the same batch will take in
Silicon while others will not. In fact, they don't even seem to
have noticed that recently revealed detail.

It's very distressing however, to see once again how some scientists
were misled by that 2003 article in Science and by all the false
assumptions and total nonsense contained in initial media reports about
the anthrax attacks of 2001.

January 10, 2009 (A)
- From the realm of "And I thought I'd heard everything," it appears
that a scientist, Dr. Judy
Wood, whose PhD is in Materials Engineering Science, is
trying to get the U.S. Supreme Court to hear her argument that that
World Trade Center Twin Towers weren't brought down by the aircraft
that hit them on 9/11, nor by explosives planted by the CIA, but by
some kind of "directed
energy weapon." Her case has been thrown out by lower courts,
but she is filing a Writ
of Certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court in an attempt to get
around the fact that she has no right to an appeal to the Supreme Court
in the case. Evidently, she truly
believes a directed energy weapon was used and no finding from
The National Institute of Standards and Technology or anyone else can
persuade her otherwise.

pdates
& Changes: Friday, January 1,
2010, thru Saturday, January 9, 2010
January 7, 2010 (B) - Someone just
sent
me a copy of a January 2010 article from the Journal of Bacteriology
titled "The
Silicon Layer Supports Acid Resistance of Bacillus cereus Spores"
which I'll need to study for a few days and perhaps discuss with some
microbiologists. It seems to add a lot of
information about natural
silicon presence in spores that further shoots down all the nonsensical
claims that
the silicon in the 2001 attack spores must have come from some kind
of "weaponization" process. The article appears to explain
why the silicon
is taken in by some bacteria forming spores and seem to go into detail
about why
some spore-forming bacteria do it and others don't.

January 7, 2010 (A) - According to The
Guardian, the number of anthrax deaths from contaminated
heroin in Scotland has now risen to six.
They seem to be expecting it to go higher.

January 6, 2010 - According to The
Times of London, there have now been five deaths from anthrax and
six others are in hospital as a result of contaminated heroin in
Scotland. That's the same number of deaths as occurred in
the anthrax attacks of 2001 in the U.S. But the Scotland cases
could produce still more deaths.

January
3, 2010 - The start of a new year
is a good time to take a look at the old year.

Although I logged only 65 news articles about anthrax during all of
2009, there was still plenty to write about. During the year,
there
were numerous scientific presentations providing new and fascinating
details about the science used in the Amerithrax investigation
(although we still haven't seen exactly how the science was used to
finger Dr. Ivins). So, a big part of my comments during 2009
were
about the science. Another big part was spent on looking at the
known evidence pointing to Dr. Ivins' guilt. When you
consider that a typical book consists of 60,000 words, I wrote the
word equivalent of 1.7 books last year. Here are the word counts
for my comments for the past 9 years:

And that's just comments. It doesn't include what I wrote in
supplementary pages.

I also wondered why my comments for 2009 took up so much disk space
(I had to break the comments into two sections to make the files
manageable for people who still only have dial-up Internet
connections). If I wrote more words in 2008 than in 2009, 2008
should have occupied more disk space, but it didn't. It turned
out the increase was the result of changing web site coding
software. The new software I started using in January of 2009
generates more html code.

Because I was in an analytical mood, I also took a look at November to
try to figure out if there was any pattern that might explain why this
web site got more visitors during that month than during any other
month in 2009. I confirmed that it was definitely the result of
getting 3,111
visitors from StumbleUpon.com. I had a total of 14,850 visitors
during
November. So, StumbleUpon.com made up 21 percent of that - a huge percentage compared to
anything else. I looked through
the search arguments
people used to get to my site, but there was nothing unusual in
November. I then looked for
some
pattern to the surge in visitors from StumbleUpon, but found nothing
significant. There was a smaller surge in May, but no explanation
for it. I wondered if there might be some annual pattern, so I
checked all StumbleUpon visitors for 2008. This is what the
activity for 2008 & 2009 looks like:

If
the StumbleUpon numbers had been driven by news about the Amerithrax
investigation, August 2008 should have been a BIG month, but it
wasn't. So, the pattern is governed by something I
cannot see, possibly by the way StumbleUpon.com chooses sites. It
certainly looks like they changed something in October of 2008 that
affected the number of visitors they send me. That may be when they
started sending people interested in "terrorism" to my site instead of
sending people on a purely random basis. That could explain why
August
2008 had low numbers and October 2008 had big numbers. Or it
could be
that every five or
six months I go to the top of some kind of list they maintain.

That's the way it is when you analyze data. At some point in
time, further analysis may not be worthwhile. I could try to
contact StumbleUpon.com to see if they can explain things, but that
would
be like asking directions when lost. Men don't do that.
(Just a joke.) Actually, I don't care. There's no reason to
be concerned about it. Years ago, I tried contacting them to get
them to stop
sending me visitors, since random visitors just screwed up my
statistics. But I couldn't get a response. Now that they're
primarily
sending people interested in "terrorism," it doesn't really concern me
anymore.

I'm also becoming less interested in what the conspiracy theorists and
True Believers say. They're just repeating old arguments, proving
that it's pointless to argue with them. When they aren't citing
each other as proof of their beliefs, they're going through the same
list of arguments over and over, ignoring all the facts which prove
them wrong.

If the Amerithrax case is officially closed late this month or early
this year, there'll definitely be a lot
to write about during 2010. Will the conspiracy theorists and
True Believers find some new arguments? Probably not. It
will more likely be the same old arguments about how they believe that
old, inaccurate news reports from 2001 and 2002 totally disprove solid new data released in
2010. Or they may just chant versions of their primary slogan
over and over: "I don't care what the facts say, I'm going to believe
what I want to believe!"January
2, 2010 -
Yesterday, in a good example of the blind leading the blind, The
Washington Examiner published a brief opinion piece titled "Who
was behind the September 2001 anthrax attacks?" That opinion
piece merely repeats the badly misinformed December
21, 2009 opinion of Edward Jay Epstein. And AmericanThinker.com
picked up what the Examiner columnist wrote as if it was a significant
piece of news.

And it's all about nonsense that was shown to be nonsense eight
years ago:
the mistaken belief that the attack anthrax was in some
super-sophisticated form that could only be produced by some
state-sponsored bioweapons lab.